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We started where the granite falls,

flipping ties above Yosemite’s walls,

and something in the blood said go,

not fast, not straight, but north and slow.

To Jenner where the river drowns,

we pulled the old barns to the ground,

then east through Colusa’s heat

to lay the prunes and walnuts sweet

in rows that dried beneath the sun,

work for winter, never done.

Up the Sierra’s golden seams

we panned the creeks and cut the means,

built the roads that let men pass,

then doubled back toward Pacific glass.

A zigzag stitch across the map,

but every loop drew north a lap.

On Airport Road the spruce came down,

Port Orford cedar, pale as the crown

of morning, honey-grained and light,

we traded straight for valley right,

for fruit and nut and earth to own.

The buyer drowned it under cranberry alone.

Alpine waited, in between,

too young to log, too spent to clean,

worn thin by hands that came before.

But we could read what it was for.

The lesson there ran deep and true,

the land remembers what you do.

And every generation hands

the work, the wager, and the lands

to those who come behind the plow,

some clumsy, some who keep the vow.

The teaching passed from kin to kin

was how to tend, to heal, to mend again,

to read the soil and know its worth,

to give back more than we took from earth.

We learned the names of what is rare,

the things that live almost nowhere,

the Fender’s blue on lupine wing,

the Kincaid’s bloom, the small soft things,

the daisy, larkspur, checkermallow,

roots that hold the wet and fallow.

We kept it. Kept on climbing too,

till the green Willamette opened through.

Here the white oaks hold their ground,

a hundred winters, two, around

the camas fields our oldest kin

laid down before the world grew thin,

ten thousand springs of patient hands

who burned and tended, read the land.

So this is where the migration ends,

where root and labor finally blends:

the oak stands guard, the elk move slow,

the bees go where the blue blooms grow,

and one late monarch, fourth of its line,

rides the long migration home.

On a Wednesday in September of 1992, my dad called about a farm. Two hundred sixty-five acres in the Willamette Valley had come up, and he wanted to know if it had promise. Back then unirrigated farmland in the area went for something like a thousand dollars an acre. It still blows my mind to say that out loud.

I drove down to have a look. About a third of it was forest. Another third was good farmland. One border ran along Muddy Creek. There was an old farmstead and a trailer where a mother and daughter lived, eighty and fifty-five years old. Up on the hills between the fields and the timber sat a couple of five-acre Christmas tree farms. In between lay oak prairie and savanna, the kind of open ground where a few trees had been standing long before any of us showed up.

A forester in Corvallis named Bob Latham found it. He figured the timber was too young to cut, but he passed it along anyway. I parked at the northeast corner and hiked straight up through the forest.

What I walked into didn’t look like young trees. It looked like a harvestable stand. There was Douglas fir sixteen, eighteen, twenty inches through and a good eighty to one hundred and twenty feet tall, a lot of them climbing right up over the oaks. You could read the whole history standing there. It had been oak country once, open ground, grazed by cattle. Somewhere in the late fifties or early sixties the cattle went away. And out in that old pasture stood three big Douglas firs, forty to fifty inches across, with huge limbs, the kind a tree only throws when it grows up alone in the open. Those three had seeded the whole hillside, ninety or a hundred acres of forest, in thirty or forty years.

Jack put his hands on that ground years later. “I remember growing up,” he wrote, “the smell of the air and soil was different under the oaks than it was in the forest.” He was right, and standing up there in ’92 I was looking at the reason for it. The fir had taken the high seat. The Oregon white oaks underneath were fighting for light and losing.

When I broke out on top, the view stopped me cold. I don’t remember whether I found a phone booth on the way home or waited until I got there. Either way the call was short. “This is a gem. We need to buy it.”

A week later I drove Jan down and we walked it together. We loved it.

My folks ended up buying it on their own. Before long they’d hired an architect named Gary Day and built a house near where I had come out of the forest. I supplied much of the lumber for it, beams and framing and siding and finish, hauled in by good friends in the business. When the house was finished, they named it Raindance Ranch.

All three of our boys arrived in the years after. Nick, Jack, and Zack grew up out there, playing, hiking, planting, working. That ground is in them and always will be.

The oaks got their due eventually. There’s oak savanna out there now, restored, a lot of hard work in it. A researcher from the Corvallis area, Dennis Albert, studied a piece of one of the old oaks that had fallen and counted the rings back to 1608.

Jack runs the Oswego Lake Watershed Council these days, and those trees never left him. “My grandparents introduced me to oak trees in 1996 on their ranch in the Willamette Valley,” he wrote not long ago, “a playground of ponds, creeks, crops, woods, pasture, oak prairie, and savanna.” He thinks about them the way you think about elders. “These trees are older than me,” he wrote, “but their young offspring are brand new. Each acorn carries the story of its ancestors and the memory of the place.” And about what it means to have land like that handed down: “These trees have grown under the care, or neglect, of many generations. Each generation has both the benefits and the responsibilities of the land.”

He calls an oak a memory and a connector. He got that right.

Most of the timber out there is seventy to eighty years old now. The old farmhouse still stands next to an older orchard, and the new orchard up by the house, near where I came out of the forest thirty-three years ago, has filled all the way in. The wildlife flourishes. Back in that ninety acres of fir, though, the oaks are mostly gone, nine hundred, maybe twelve hundred of them in there once, most of them dead now, a few still hanging on with a branch or two of leaves.

Which brings me to a table.

When I was a senior in high school I took wood shop, like I had every year, but that last year I wanted something big. My dad had two thick redwood slabs he’d salvaged from a log that had rolled to the bottom of a canyon decades before. Somebody had cut it up, chainsaw or otherwise, and the slabs ran four or five inches thick. I built a table out of one of them, posts, rails, and that big slab on top. When I finished it, it went to my dad’s forestry company and sat in the conference room at Hammon, Jensen & Wallen for a few years.

When my dad left the firm, we had to get the table out. My best man, Bruce Nikolai, who I grew up with back in Orinda, and I, and a couple of others, stood there working out that the thing was too big to fit through the office door. So we slid a window open and took it out that way.

It sits at Raindance Ranch now, out past Monroe toward Alpine, on ground that was holding its own trees long before it ever held that table.

I met Ken DeLong down in the Bay Area fifteen or twenty years ago. We had been selling his company, Kelleher, some cedar clears and a little Doug fir. A guy named Jeff Barnes was buying it and shipping most of it to Home Depot. I wanted to see who these people were, so I went over to their branch in Novato, out at Blackpoint. Kelleher was sold in 2025 to Woodgrain. Don Kelleher, well into his eighties, chose retirement and financial security over the operational challenge that running a five distribution yard operation can be.

I walk in and there’s just these dudes, kicking around, laughing, having a good time in the middle of a workday. That was the whole first impression. Not a quiet sales floor with everybody’s head down. A crew.

I had actually been introduced to Ken over the phone by Chris Shively out in Hawaii, who I was shipping Doug fir lumber and moldings to. Chris said you have got to get down to Novato and meet Ken. So I did. And during that visit, I remember Ed Schurr saying, Kenny, you have to get Dave to come to your golf tournament. I had no idea what that was, but I was about to find out.

Turns out Ken had had a heart transplant, and the golf tournament was a lot more than golf. They played poker the night before. They golfed. They went bowling. Maybe there were darts, I honestly can’t remember, there was so much going on. It was an all day and all night affair. I went down for it a few times and it was an absolute blast. Those guys took me in like I was one of them, like I had grown up with their crew in Marin County and played ball with them since high school, which I hadn’t. They just decided I was family. That meant something to me.

The business was easy because we spoke the same language. Honesty and common sense, that was it, our guide. Over the years we kept adding to it, cedar, hemlock, moldings. Good years, great people.

Then Ken’s brother Jim moved up to Oregon, right around the start of the pandemic. Ken came up to see him, and the four of us, Ken, Jim, Jack Alley, and me, went down and golfed Bandon Dunes, which is about as good as golf gets on the Oregon coast. We visited Oregon Overseas Timber. We toured up through the valley, McCool Millwork, our plant in Philomath, the works. Good meals along the way, the last one outside overlooking the Pacific.

The whole visit, Jim kept eyeing our low grade. The falldowns, the cedar and fir that comes off the bottom of the run, and he kept asking me, how much is this, how much is that. Finally I said, you keep asking, let’s just send you a truckload and see if you can sell it.

So we did. Shipped a load down to Bandon. Jim put it up on Craigslist, and before I knew it he was calling to buy another. At that point we are talking a hundred dollars a thousand. Dirt cheap. Two thousand dollars for an entire semi load of lumber. Beaded ceiling, tongue and groove, bevel siding, surfaced boards of every size, handrail, short stuff, knots, splits, none of it mattered. Jim sold all of it. Some of it I think he moved as grilling planks, since he was on the coast in salmon country. Dozens of semi loads over a few years, out of the back of a truck, unloaded with a tractor at his friend’s farm.

Handrail is its own little world, and Jim moved that too. We have run a lot of profiles over the years, but it is only a fraction of what is out there, every shape and size and species you can think of. Solid wood, and laminated too, up and down or side to side once the sections get big. Move around the world and the species change with the place. On the West Coast it is mostly Douglas fir, a little redwood, some red cedar. My favorite by far is yellow cedar. It doesn’t splinter, it works easy, and it weathers to a soft silver gray. I have replaced handrails with it myself. There is a run of it in my house near Corvallis, sixteen or eighteen feet, going down into the basement. Not original, but smooth as silk, and it will be there long after I am gone.

It was the simplest business I have ever done. A handshake deal without the handshake, implied from day one. Every month or so a check would show up for the last load shipped, with a note asking for another. No contracts. No back and forth. Those two were about the most trustworthy, honest guys I have ever dealt with. And they knew how to have a good time.

I talked with Kenny a few days before he passed. His heart was finally giving out, and he was calling me from his hospital room. He wanted more lumber shipped. Still living the dream, right to the end. We had a great talk. It hurts and makes me smile, both at once, every time I think of him.

Cris Schureman and Martin Schwab and I have skied knee-deep powder in Steamboat and sipped Goldschlager in Breckenridge. We’ve also spent a night in a $20 hostel, in the depths of the great recession in July of 2009. Good times and lean ones, same three guys.
I got to know them in the early ’90s, when they became good customers of mine at KD Cedar Supply. They were the Specialty wood salesmen in Denver back when both of our companies were subsidiaries of Tumac Lumber in Portland. When my time at Tumac ended and my time at Patrick Lumber began in 1997, they were among my first customers. We quickly became friends, all of us raising families and sharing the same values. Honesty, and sometimes being overly direct, somehow only strengthened the bond.
I’ll own the overly direct part. There’s a little wooden Buddha on my desk, three or four inches across, that I picked up in Vietnam in 2020, right before the pandemic. I bought it off the man who carved it. About halfway down the country we walked through a village, crossed a channel in a rickety little rowboat, and on the far bank a couple had their carvings out on a few stands. The fellow in back had a whole row of Buddhas, most of them finished, but he was working on one, and that was the one I wanted, right out of his hand. It took some doing to pry it loose, and I’m sure I paid twice what I should have, but I wanted that one because it wasn’t done. I rub its belly three times a day, and I rub the belly of every Buddha I pass, three times, same deal. That little guy has done me a lot of good. He reminds me to ease up, to let the stress that comes with this business roll off, and he makes me smile every time. Cris and Martin had years of me at full throttle before he ever landed on my desk, and they stuck around anyway.
Before long they got the urge to start out on their own, and they asked whether Patrick would finance the venture. Of course, I said. Bob McCracken believed in empowerment theory, and he was hungry for new ideas to rebuild the business after a tumultuous decade in the ’90s. The concept became Wood Source, and they went to work. Wood flowed in, and before long our old company was caught peeking over the fence. That’s when we knew we’d made it.
Our first yard was barely a yard at all. A right-of-way, a strip of land maybe a hundred feet by five hundred, wedged between a dive bar and the freeway just south of Golden. We ran there for a few years before we moved over next to Reed Mill, where they leased us a rugged, triangular piece fenced in between another freeway and the road. We worked out of there for the better part of a decade, and it taught us a few things. The freeway flooded us out once, all that road water coming straight into the yard. And we had men stealing beams off the back side, right over the razor wire. Big timbers, twelve by twelves, twenty-four feet long. They’d roll them off the top of the pile down onto the railroad tracks. It takes six or eight men to carry a twelve by twelve that long, so they were coming in a crew, and we finally caught them on camera.
Eventually we put a deal together and bought our own ground in Thornton, and developed half of it. That’s where we’ve been ever since. Quieter out there. When we first moved in you could look across the street and watch the buffalo roaming. I don’t think they’re there anymore.
Martin’s creativity and the grit and determination that define Cris made the partnership an instant success. You buy lumber and you sell lumber, what’s hard about that? Plenty, when you’re new. Suppliers wanted volume before they’d open a line, and that was never a problem with these two. Cris and Martin were like a giant termite. Everything you shipped them, they consumed. When Sierra Pacific agreed to sell us eight loads of incense cedar, one of their big multi-state distributors called a meeting at SPI headquarters to fight it. Brad Mehl, our salesman at SPI then, went to bat for us in that boardroom, made the case, and won.
Cris and Martin had their first million-dollar sales month in October of 2003. To celebrate, they opened a bottle of wine with a story behind it and then went back to work. By then they were the fourth and fifth shareholders in Patrick’s fourth generation of ownership.
Cris and Martin are two of the best sales guys I have ever known. They have put an immense amount of high-grade lumber into the Colorado Rockies, and a good deal more into markets well beyond it. It has been a great ride.

https://www.opb.org/article/2023/11/15/new-lumber-mill-in-philomath-aims-to-market-oregon-hardwoods/

The Hardwood Mill

In November of 2023 I sat down with Dave Miller on OPB’s Think Out Loud to talk about something new for Patrick Lumber. We’ve been at this since 1915 — 108 years — and the company has changed shape more than once. We started as an office wholesale broker and over time became a secondary manufacturer, taking wood from sawmills up and down the west coast and refining it for furniture, flooring, windows, doors and cabinetry. For most of that history the wood was softwood: Doug fir, hemlock, red cedar, the species you see growing out here.

But there’s another resource in these woods nobody was using. As forest managers thin the western Oregon forests for fire protection, the hardwoods come down too: oak, several species of it, plus maple, madrone, ash, even walnut, which isn’t native but grows here just fine. A dozen species could be milled into lumber. Instead most of it gets burned, chipped for pulp, cut into firewood or hauled to the landfill. That always struck me as a waste. There’s far more of it than we could ever process, but we can make a difference, and lumber is a better use for a beautiful tree.

And some of it is beautiful. The figured maple around here has grain that looks like marble or granite, and there’s a grade called fiddleback that goes straight into violins and cellos. My own favorite is walnut: that deep, dark, rich color never gets old. You see the live-edge slabs coming off these logs for countertops and tables and they’re really pieces of artwork. Every tree has its own story.

Here’s the part people enjoy. We bought the Philomath site in 2016, the old Mary’s River Lumber yard that cut western red cedar, and we bought it mostly for the kilns. Next door sat a ten-acre parcel we didn’t think much about, until one day the DEA showed up and arrested an outfit growing marijuana illegally on it. Six months later we were able to buy that ground, and that’s exactly where the new mill is going. You can’t make this stuff up.

We did a trial run first on a little Wood-Mizer, cut a few species, proved we could dry the lumber, and sold the stock. Oak is stubborn, it takes its time. Production came in 2025. We’ll pay a family living wage, right next to Corvallis and Oregon State’s forestry program, in a town that’s always been a timber town.

I’m an OSU grad living in Corvallis now, so leaving Portland after all those years has been a joy, not a loss. Oregon is rich in wood, richer than Doug fir alone, and sharing that with the rest of the world is something every Oregonian can be proud of. Wood is good.

When the pandemic sent us out of the office in 2020, we ended up doing a lot of our meetings outside, in Philomath. That was already the production side of the company, the old mill site we’d taken on, with another twenty-some acres added a couple years later, so there was plenty of room. Plenty of hill.

My partner Brad Mehl was always around, and he was always after me to walk the hill with him. He’d go on about the view. The silviculture. Mary’s Peak sitting right there. He’d keep saying it: this is the heart of Oregon forestry. I’d walk it with him and he wasn’t wrong.

About then our office lease in Portland was coming up. We were finishing a second seven year term, due to end in December of 2020. So you do the math a guy does standing on a hillside he already owns, looking at a rent check. For roughly a ten year payback, we could build our own office right there on site. Stop renting. Put the company where the wood was.

Leaving Portland was not a small thing. Patrick Lumber had been a Portland company for over a hundred years. You don’t walk away from an address like that on a whim. But we were already growing roots in Benton county, and roots are hard to argue with.

So 2021 was the year of planning and selling the idea and drawing it up. The shareholders came around quickly. Brad’s dad Buck helped us flag a path for the road to follow up to where our building was going to sit. Then the cat came on and scraped it in, gravel down, and we had our road. Once the trading group could drive up there and stand on it and see what Brad had been seeing, they came around too. Patrick Lumber was going to have a new home.

The design came off a barn. There’s a place a few miles west of our mill, an old barn the owners of Lumos Winery had fixed up with a wine tasting room and a deck off the side. It just resonated with us. Understated. Oversized timber frame. A barn that didn’t apologize for being a barn. We got Dave Clingman, an architect and a trader for Wood Source out of Colorado, and my son Nick, who’s a structural engineer with a keen eye for design, and the two of them designed the building off that feeling. We signed DC Builders to put it up. Those two deserve a lot of the credit for it ever happening.

I’ll tell you what’s in the walls, because the walls are what it’s all about.

Most of the structure is salvage. The timber frame came primarily from logs off the 2020 Oregon fire salvage. The big timbers came from Lynn Herbert. And the siding is reclaimed redwood bridge timber. The wood for the ceiling in Terminal B at Sacramento International Airport came from the Franklin-Thornton Bridge, an old wooden bridge that was built in 1937 and was subsequently damaged by floods in 1997. A company called McCool Millwork machined that run of redwood for the airport. This was the leftover. It had been sitting around a few years and I think they were just tired of looking at it, so we bought it.

Then we went to work on it. We ripped a six by six off each timber and flipped it to make vertical grain one by six for the battens. We resawed the rest into one by ten boards. So the whole building is wrapped in board and batten, a good wide six inch batten, every stick of it redwood that already had a long life in it before it got to us. The Franklin-Thornton Bridge, taken apart, run through a mill, and stood back up as the Timber Hall in Philomath, Oregon.

Inside it keeps going. Ulli Lau donated all the vertical grain Douglas fir for the door and window trim. The exterior decking is Alaska yellow cedar. There’s Oregon walnut in some of the furniture, and hemlock and tan oak and alder showing up here and there. Every board in that building is a species we know and have shipped and stood behind. It’s not decoration. It’s the inventory, sawn up and put where people can sit with it.

And the sugar pine table is in there. The one Mike Redmond built for us out of three inch slabs, the one it took six men to carry into the conference room. It is not leaving that building. I’ve written about that table already. It belongs here too.

There’s one more thing the building does just by standing there. It’s a carbon bank. Every stick of that salvaged redwood and fire-killed fir is holding its carbon for another century instead of burning up or rotting back into the air. That’s how mass timber works. Framing it in wood instead of steel and concrete has the embodied carbon effect with a twenty five to forty percent reduction in emissions.

So we leaned into it. We designed the Timber Hall to use about twice as much wood as it actually needed. The 12×12 beams that rise up from below the floor run twelve board feet to the linear foot. The 8x8s they replaced would have run five and a third. Same story overhead, where the 10×10 roof structure is way over-engineered, a lot more wood than the load calls for. We did that on purpose. More wood makes a room feel like a forest. The building that holds the most carbon happens to be the one that feels the most alive. We did it for the feel. The extra carbon lock is a bonus.

The building has a soul. I keep coming back to Frank Lloyd Wright when I try to say why. Organic architecture, he called it. Buildings sited to be looked at as one with the land instead of stuck on top of it. The Timber Hall already seems to grow into the hill rather than out of it. That was Brad’s hillside the whole time. We just finally built on it.

We finished construction and moved in the spring of 2023. Another rebirth for a company that started in 1915, and a chance to point it at the future instead of the past. The monthly trader meeting that we’d started outside during the pandemic, before there was any building at all, just kept going. Now it has a roof. A roof made out of a burned forest and an old California bridge, looking out at the heart of Oregon forestry.

Mr. Mehl’s hillside walks did that. Meetings have commenced. Transactions completed. Lumber traded.

Wood is good in a lot of ways. This is one of them.

My grandmother grew up in a town that doesn’t exist anymore. Kennett, California, in the Sacramento River Canyon. In 1944 and 1945 they finished Shasta Dam, and the river backed up and swallowed it whole. It’s still down there, sunk.

Her grandfather, James Smithson, was one of the great stagecoach men of that country. He ran stages from Redding north through Ashland and further into Oregon, and Jacksonville was a stop along that route. I have heard the stories and read the books about the day Black Bart stepped out of the brush and made him rein in his team. In those same years the Bilger family were Jacksonville’s leading merchants: hardware, county contracts, bridge fittings. Two families on one road. John Bilger arrived in 1856, and James Smithson was working that corridor by 1859. The Smithsons are my father’s side, the Bilgers my mother’s, so both sides of my family were on that same stretch of road long before they ever met. Walk into the Jacksonville cemetery today and you’ll find the Bilgers under a big tree, Italian marble obelisk, Masonic compass and all. I’d love to know if those two men ever shook hands. I bet they did.

But the story I keep coming back to is the summer of 1925. Beth was twenty-two, just out of the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Her fiancé had gotten her sister pregnant and married her instead. Her photo album from May of that year has one caption beneath a photo: Cinderella Loses a Slipper. And then, that summer, she and two friends and a mule headed into the backcountry of Yosemite. She called it her Very Merry Fairy Dream. She knew those forests and that valley, the sequoias, the light through the pines and the Ahwahnee, fifty years before I did. I came to Yosemite and felt what she must have felt. The place does that to you.

Art was infused in her. That’s the only way to say it. She didn’t think of herself as an artist in the classical sense. But she moved through the world like one. The photo journals. The Ikebana. The way she saw things, the way she dressed, the food she cooked. She loved to watch young people move and wasn’t the least bit critical of any of it.

Her granddaughter Stacy said it best: “She has always been my fairy godmother, my tinkling bell in the warm spring breeze. I always accepted that, never questioning, just knowing she was this special spirit who watched over me… she makes me want to be someone better, a more generous soul.”

She came to my wedding in 1988. At eighty-five years old, with a terminal illness, we danced. She danced like she was twenty-five. Whimsical. Light. The fairy dream still in her. She died later that year.

Which brings me to the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. McMenamins owns it now, right on Burnside, and it has one of the last floating dance floors in the country. Sprung underneath, engineered to move with the crowd. That’s the whole point. On April 13, 2014, my boys were at a Schoolboy Q show there. The crowd went so hard that a support beam under the floor cracked. They evacuated the building. Jan went and retrieved them. People still call it the night Schoolboy Q broke the Crystal Ballroom.

My grandmother probably never danced on that floor. But if she did, she loved it for sure.

When growing up in the Bay Area, my Uncle Tom drove over the hill from school at Cal Berkeley and Stanford to see us. I remember a Grate Dane named Thud, a VW Bus, and always a guitar slung over his shoulder. Here are a few of my favorite songs salvaged from old CD’s. Enjoy!