Artist with a 20-Lb. Saw

By TED GUP

For 44 of his 64 years, Dale Page has been a cutter of trees, as was his father before him. He may have cleared as much of the ancient Northwest forest as any man. This day he is clear-cutting a three-acre patch of old growth. The area is designated as a possible spotted-owl habitat, but Page has never seen one of the birds. He stands among rhododendron, sword ferns and buckbrush, his body testimony to the perils of his work. The pitch of his chain saw screaming at 13,000 r.p.m. has left him hard of hearing, an upended log cost him part of his left foot, and a misstep impaled him on a stick that punctured his bowels. "All in all, I'd say I've been mighty lucky," says Page, and, comparing himself with those loggers who have lost a leg or even a life, he is right.

A quiet man with an off-center smile, he shares his thoughts only when pressed. He is rugged but not callous. His peers consider him an artist in the way he brings down mammoth firs to fall side by side, within inches of one another. With a 20-lb. saw hoisted to his shoulder and an ax in hand, he walks on logs with the grace of a gymnast on the high beam. But standing atop the trunk that was a 200-year-old tree, he can still share in the forest's loss. "It doesn't take long," he says. "To think it's been growing for 200 years or better, and then it's down in a minute and a half. It's kind of sad. It affects you. I don't think you'd be human if it didn't."

Page counts himself an ally of nature, not an enemy. "An old-growth forest is unique," he says. "There's just something about a big tree that makes you feel kind of small." Like many of the other loggers, his relationship with the forest extends beyond the edge of his saw. "After working in the woods for 44 years, I guess wilderness means a place you can go where you know man hasn't trifled with it, where you can think it's the way Ma Nature wanted it to be." But Page looks beyond the clearing he has cut and sees the nation's inexhaustible appetite for wood. "It's something I think that has to be done, if we want to live in a nice home and have toilet paper and the likes of that," he says.

The cutter sees the toll that greed has exacted from the land. But it was not so apparent early in his career. "There was tremendous waste in those days," he recalls. "Profit was the name of the game. We thought we would never run out of timber. We started way too late on reforestation." Now he recognizes the need to protect nature from man. "We've only got this one old earth," he says, "and we better take care of it. I most certainly do not think 'environmentalist' is a dirty word. Anybody who isn't one has his head in the sand."

Page, who is retiring this winter, wants to see a balance struck between those who call for the preservation of the wilderness and those who make a living from timbering. One thing he knows: change is coming to this valley, and it may be harsh.

By T.G.