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Reviews
White Poplar, Black Locust
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By Louise Wagenknecht
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University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2003. Illustrations, bibliography. 263 pages. $26.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Robert E. Walls
Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania
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| Memoirs are inherently subjective documents, shaped by the author's reform-ulations of memories through the years and selective presentation of historical facts through a series of stories. When properly done, however, memoirs can be among the most revealing sources for understanding the past. Using the personal and the historical to both move and inform readers, memoirs offer a way to see through another's eyes the tragedies and triumphs that constituted everyday life. Louise Wagen-knecht, a long-time employee of the U.S. Forest Service, has given us just such a book. |
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White Poplar, Black Locust describes the history of Hilt, a small company town in the Klamath Mountains of northern California owned by the Fruit Growers Supply Company and devoted to the production of lumber — at first, thin slats of sugar or ponderosa pine used to construct boxes and, later, dimensional lumber. Using selected written materials, stories that relatives and friends told her, and, primarily, her own memories, the author details the sixty-three-year history of a resource-based community and its role in the environmental transformation of the surrounding area. It is a dramatic tale, one that highlights the intimate and occasionally distressing details of Wagenknecht's own family's life and their connection to the nearby natural world. |
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Wagenknecht is refreshingly candid in her critical attention to local social life and its wood-based industrial context. More important, however, is that her portrait uses a gendered lens: a young girl's and then a woman's perspective on a male-dominated world that is so often romanticized. Details abound about the lives of mothers and daughters in juxtaposition to those of fathers and sons, with somber and evocative tales of racism, ethnicity, union strife, sexuality, religion, and domestic violence. The Bunyanesque balloon of the masculine self-importance of loggers and lumbermen — so commonly inflated in industry histories — is effectively, but fairly, punctured in the process. Even more important than this wonderfully textured illustration of working-class community life, however, is the author's description of women's interaction with the landscape, its flora and fauna, and the traditional outdoor activities that became such an important part of their world. |
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We are treated to images of an immigrant grandmother tying flies, outfishing her husband, and lecturing on the waste of wood, providing her grandchildren's first environmental lesson; housewives putting out small brushfires near homes; women obtaining hunting licenses so that their husbands could illegally hunt a second time during a single season. Wagenknecht describes how she acquired her knowledge of the natural world through collections of rocks, pressed flowers, lichens, and seeds and how she came to understand humans' impact on nature and the potential for species endangerment by observing the arrogant practices of boys and men as they shot and trapped wildlife for bounties or pleasure. Yet, she acknowledges that her interests in and knowledge of nature were cultivated by her abusive stepfather, a forester who took her along logging roads to pick berries and flowers, hunt deer and fish for trout, and generally see the forest in all its complexity — and all its opportunity for human exploitation. |
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Through these experiences, and because Hilt no longer exists, the author gradually learned that "the Western dream was unsustainable" (p. 252). New technologies of lumbering — including truck logging on roads that climbed into the high country of private and federal lands, ensuring the near elimination of old-growth stands and exacerbating erosion that damaged fish habitat — spelled the end of the company town's way of life. The conversion of timber from open-spaced stands of pine to thick profusions of Douglas fir led to the fire-prone situation that currently haunts the region. While Wagenkenecht's portrait of environmental transformation does not describe the timber industry's attempts to promote the optimistic spirit of modern forestry or try to capture the sense of a community's hope in the prospects of reforestation, it certainly does lay bare the process by which the woods today have been remade and the consequences of that change. |
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This book is a compelling read, offering a valuable blend of humanistic and scientific approaches to Northwest history and the ways in which a specific sense of place is constructed. In its attention to a woman's perspective within a male-dominated lumbering milieu, it is reminiscent of Kim Barnes's In the Wilderness. Wagen-knecht's memoir, however, is concerned with interweaving a story of gender and class with a tale of environmental understanding. That is the real contribution of White Poplar, Black Locust, as it links the personal and the historical to portray an emergence of self in a context of radical social and environmental change and ultimately teaches us much about arrogance and loss, respect and sustainability. |
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