ORICK, CALIF. — Ron Barlow's 34-year career at the sawmill in the heart of California's Redwood Empire was a study in consistency.
From behind the wheel of his yellow LeTourneau log stacker, he watched trees swaying against a bright blue summer sky. In the fall, yellow aspens provided a blast of color in the fog-shrouded forest. Spring brought light-green sprouts of grass poking out of the damp, evergreen-scented ground.
Barlow's own season at the mill ended this month when the Seattle lumber company that owns the facility padlocked the gates, leaving more than 40 workers jobless. It was the last such facility in a community that once housed five, and about the only place in town someone with only a high school education could make $20 an hour.
"It's devastating to our community," Barlow, 54, said from his frontyard, surrounded by apple trees and lowing cows. "Most people will have to commute out of Orick to find work."
Add another casualty to the nation's housing slowdown: California's timber industry.
With U.S. housing starts in the dumps, most lumberjacks or "fallers" who cut trees are unemployed. Many mills that shape that timber into boards are closing their doors. And some truckers who transported all those trees and lumber have idled their rigs. Last year, softwood production at sawmills in 12 Western states sank to the lowest level in half a century, according to the Western Wood Products Assn. Lumber prices have plummeted.
There's no relief in sight. Workers this week decried the closure of California's last pulp mill in Samoa, 40 miles south of Orick, after the owners failed to win federal stimulus funds to revamp the facility. Finding enough wood chips to supply the plant has been tough with the timber industry in disarray.
"Wages at the plant put well over $11 million into the local economy," said Nate Zink, president of the Assn. of Western Pulp & Paper Workers, Local 49. "Now we're being forced into the job market, and there aren't a lot of jobs out there."
The slowdown is hurting communities throughout Northern California, including tiny Orick, population about 300. Life here in rural Humboldt County is marked by the sudden appearance of a herd of elk in a clearing and gentle tides on the rocky seashore a few minutes outside town.
Many residents have never ventured the 700 miles south to sprawling, smoggy Los Angeles, and don't much care to. Yet their fate is inextricably linked to the construction of subdivisions, apartments and condos in Southern California.
