Washington Rebel

What I Learned from Forks, Washington

Buzz Martin

When I first showed up in Forks, WA in 1972, I had shoulder length hair, a cannabis sativa patch on my right shoulder, and a Karl Marx patch on my left.  I was set for makin' friends!

Well, things didn't go all that well for me.  Most of my new "friends" weren't very nice.  I lived to experience things it still hurts to talk about, but . . . .

For some reason they elected me senior class president, class of '75, and then, the summer of '76, I set my first Choker.  12 hours a day, came to $90 a day.

A great many changes had come over me during those tumultuous years.  For one, I had an epiphany about hippies and the Left in the spring of '74 that caused me to reject what the Left had to offer.  I saw what rank phonies they were.  My innate country boy came to life with a vengeance.  Most important of all, Forks taught me how to work. You could stand in front of the Vagabond Restaurant in "uptown" Forks at 5 in the morning with a hardhat and boots.  Some crummy or another would pick you up and take you to work.

In Forks, "leeching" was vigorously condemned.  A man was measured by action, not introspection.  They didn't care how many books you had read.  They wanted to know if you could roof a house, or keep a truck runnin'.

Me?  I kept reading books, but those "redneck assholes" from Forks treated me like an equal in spite of my ways, after that first year was over.  I made lifetime friends.  People I would trust with my life, though many years have passed.

Forks, WA in the Seventies was the best time of my life, as sad as that might sound to some, but not because of bell-bottoms and polka-dot shirts.

It's because the most noble and intelligent human beings I ever met were hard workin' redneck sonsofbitches.  Everything about me that I like got chipped and polished in that tough, lovable town.

As for the Buzz, he died in '83.

P.S. The real Forks ain't no damn Twilight.  It's way, way classier than that.

What I Learned From My Old Dad

 

Omaha Beach, 1944

Let's dispense with a myth: One of the things you'll hear often is that "real war vets don't talk about their experiences."  Is that so?  If that was true, Ollie North's War Stories would run maybe a half-hour, including commercials; Band of Brothers would  have been called "Dramatic Tales from FDR's Soup Lines."  Let's face it, there would be no military history of any kind if vets sat at the table and said nothing. Thank God our Vets talk. 

My Old Dad was at the Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge and he talked about it, okay?  We never heard him say, "Yeah, and then I killed this guy", but he did talk about things, and I can honestly tell you he remained depressed the rest of his life because of World War II.  I'll explain more about that later.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

How baby boomers remember the sixties often determines how they view the world today. If they’re nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco’s Haight/Ashbury district and believe that changes in American culture resulting from the sixties have been largely positive, they probably consider themselves liberal and vote Democrat. If they have a generally negative view of those changes, they probably consider themselves conservative and vote Republican. When teaching the sixties in my 20th-century US History course, I’ve often started with this observation.  Tom McLaughlin on Whitewashed Textbooks.

I was a younger participant in the counterculture: 15-years-of age in 1972, so a lot of older hippies would Sack my Cred.  But I was devoted, damnit!  I shouldered my hair, raised my fist and got stoned whenever opportunity permitted!  Because my father was a Park Ranger, during the summers we were surrounded by upper class American youths from California and from the East who were, by my working class instincts, quite snobby.  They didn't have to work, for one -- my people were shanty Irish and came with rough hands and used backs.   These guys got to go to school where they wished, expected to become doctors, and smoked hashish in Afghanistan.  I wasn't sure I could graduate from Forks High School, let alone go to college.  They talked about flights to D.C. and Frisco and London like I would think of hitching a ride to town.  They always got the cute chicks.  The cute chicks thought I was there to serve meals and fluff the sheets.  No matter how peacey and lovey any of us acted, there was a clear, if unspoken, class distinction between us and them.

And then, there was the secret . . . . .

Spiritual Sanctuary: Growing Up in the Hoh Rain Forest

 

Hoh River Boy (r) and His Friend Gary "Makkor" Cox (l) in 1976 at the Hoh Ranger Station -- Photo by Mary Lou Hanify

Washington Rebel is lucky to have as one of its contributors Hoh River Boy, author of WR's first two articles, Remembering Bud Hanify and The Speech of the Grail -- as well as the bloke who interviewed me!  I was able to corner him at one of his favorite haunts the other day.  Over 20 or 30 cups of real black coffee, we had a leisurely conversation, the Pacific Northwest way.  I had lots of questions.

IC  What's your book about?

HRB  It's about being "born" in the Hoh Rain Forest in the 1970s.  A variety of forces conspired to drop my family into the center of rain-shrouded isolation, armed only with books, and an Irish love of conversation.  No television; very infrequent radio reception, and then only late at night, when the cloud cover was just right.  Something came alive inside me within the container of that isolation, that darkness, a something that has instructed me throughout my life.  It's about spiritual sanctuary, and how badly sanctuary is needed in our crazed modern environment.  It's also about my older self trying to make his way back to the "hearth."  I guess you could say the book is about locating that sanctuary in the topography of the soul.

IC  I know the "hearth" is at the center of the story.  But first, tell me about writing

HRB  Not much to tell.  I was always more a reader than a writer.  My mother was a writer; her grandfather Morehead bought and sold newspapers his entire professional life, from Colorado to Washington.  Writing was all I ever heard about from my mother, but it was a madness that has never fully possessed me, even now.  I worked on the school newspaper at Forks High School and took journalism courses in college, but I really didn't work very hard at writing.  It wasn't until 1979 that I wrote my first logging story.