throughout Washington state and got some odd cases from people, mostly those who were poor or isolated or desperate and had never had reason to use a lawyer before and so trusted in the telephone number Boogie gave them in his pitch. He was considered a joke in fashionable, or even semi-fashionable, circles. His brother Olden ran an office out of Portland.
“Boogie likes me because I don’t mind a little travel or working small towns. I’ve got fishing rods in the back. Also, I know how to read and can figure out how to turn on the Cubs.”
“In those television ads Boogie comes off as a sleaze with a heart of gold. Is that the way he is in real life?”
“Well, sort of. He hires kids fresh out of law school to try most of his cases. No experience, but they do their damnedest.”
“And he’s got a brother in Portland.”
“Olden Dewlapp. Boogie II, I call him. Willie knows him better than me.” I wondered: was this woman married? Where was her inevitable boyfriend? Wilbert or Clarence or Harold or whatever the hell his name was. “How about you and your owls, lady in a Volvo that poops out in the cold wind?” I liked her eyes, and there seemed no doubt that she liked mine.
Another truck zoomed by; I held on to the wheel as a wave of wind pushed my bus to one side.
She said, “I count owls. You know anything about the spotted owl controversy?”
“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “The spotted owl is an endangered species that lives in the remaining old-growth stands of Douglas fir, and if it weren’t for the fuss over saving the owls, much of that timber would already have been cut.”
“The timbermen say the real fight is about trees, but it’s easier for the environmentalists to work up public sympathy for an owl. If you eliminate a forest you eliminate flying squirrels and woodpeckers too, but that doesn’t make any difference. The spotted owl has become a celebrated cause. Is the owl endangered or not, and what is to be done with this timber?”
I said, “Which timber gets the ax and which gets spared currently depends on where the owls are, I take it.”
“Where they are and how many. Not all spotted owls are endangered or in question, mind you, only the northern spotted owl, one of three subspecies of the spotted owl.”
I grinned. “Ahh, such power doth wieldeth the mighty owl and definitions thereof.”
“But it’s Bosley Ellin who likes his lawyers.”
I knew from reading the papers that Bosley Ellin was much given to filing lawsuits claiming that the owl count in Washington State’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest was unaccountably low. Lawyers for the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club were on the other side of the legal quarreling, claiming the count was far too high.
The corporate lumber giants owned so much timberland they didn’t need logs from national forests and so were above the fray, attempting to appear calm and civilized, even statesmanlike. The small, independent mills were the ones threatened with extinction.
I said, “Ellin owns a mill himself, right? But that isn’t why his name is in the papers all the time, is it?”
“He owns Skamania-Pacific in Sixkiller, Washington, which sits at the base of some prime Douglas fir tracts in Gifford Pinchot National Forest. That’s about fifty or sixty miles north of Portland. The reason you see him quoted in the papers is because he’s the chairman of the spotted owl study committee of something called the Northwest Forest Resource Council. And why is it you’re grinning?”
“My client, Terry Harkenrider, drives a forklift for Skamania-Pacific.”
“Ahh, so you know something about the territory.”
“I know what Boogie told me on the telephone. Tell me about the Resource Council or whatever it’s called.”
“We found fifteen hundred breeding pairs and an unknown number of single birds ranging from British Columbia to northern California.”
“We?”
“The Fish and Wildlife Service. But the Resource Council found twenty-two hundred breeding pairs and said the population has been increasing by one percent a year since 1986. They concluded that spotted owls do just fine in second-growth trees from thirty to sixty years old. My aching butt!”
“Is that complete fiction? Wouldn’t it be hard to fake something like that?”
“They did most of their work in redwoods in northern California. The spotted owls living farther north in Oregon and Washington are far more reliant on old-growth timber. If you cut the Douglas fir on the Olympic Peninsula, the