continued from page 18
Schwarzenegger said he was going to shut
CARPET CLEANING Upholstery Cleaning Tile & Grout Cleaning
✓ Quality Workmanship ✓ Dependable People ✓ Fair Prices
442-3229
Ask us about Green Guard!
beauties — and the people who have taken care of them — once we lock the gates and drive away? Well, locally, nobody except BY HE IDI WALT seasonal employees will be out of E RS a job, reports Gardner with grim optimism. The ranks have already thinned, and there’s room for displaced employees at other parks. “We ran five parks last year with two rangers, open positions we couldn’t fill because of the budget,” she said. “We imported rangers from outside the area — including from some desert parks — to help us out during busy times.” The deterioration many state parks already have experienced over 20 years of steadily decreased funding — resulting in more than $1.3 billion in deferred maintenance statewide — will continue and possibly grow worse. Perhaps, however, without all of us tromping through, plants and animals will flourish in some parks. Or perhaps not. Just because gates are locked doesn’t mean people won’t tromp through. “There’s liable to be higher vandalism,” Gardner said. “There’s the fear of crimes such as marijuana grows. Fire danger. I worry about the increased poaching of resources, of trees and tree burls and animals. We have problems like that in the parks now.” Gardner said a park employee would check on the closed parks occasionally, but there would be no regular patrol. Doniger, the district interpretive coordinator, said she hopes neighbors of these parks will keep an eye on them. And it appears at least one group has committed to do so out at Grizzly, if the deal with the county falls through: EarthFirst! Humboldt, which used the park often as a base camp for staging its tree-sits and blockades during the Pacific Lumber/Maxxam days. The group plans to organize hikes in the park to keep an eye out for tree and burl poachers, O OT
In 2009, when then-Gov. Arnold
down 223 state parks, everybody freaked out. Those parks are our heritage! Repositories of our history, our culture, our natural state. Our last green, wild hope — or at least our best close-by escape from the doldrums of the office and the hard, urban streets. Skeptical folks said it was a political ploy to scare Californians into really thinking about, and acknowledging, the serious, deepdebt doo doo our state was in and summon the will to do something about it. And the threat slunk away. Now it’s back, reduced but still troubling. What does the closure of 70 state parks — or 60 or 50 or, really, any — say about us as Californians? What did we do wrong? How did we get so broke, and broken, that we now have to close state parks? “We’re a very complicated state,” Dan Walters, a political columnist for the Sacramento Bee, said over the phone recently. Walters (no relation to me), like U.S. Grant, in his youth did a term in Eureka — on occasion taking his young children camping at Benbow Lake — before heading for more fruitful ground. “We try to do too many different things with our dollars and we end up not doing any of them well.” Until we figure out how to wrangle our diverse priorities into a short list to focus on — and change the tax structure, Walters adds — the only thing to do is what’s already happening: cuts and more cuts. “The underlying thing is, over the years, voters and legislators collectively have committed California to spending more money than the revenue system can produce — even when the economy is doing well,” Walters said. “In round numbers, the general fund has a $100 billion budget, and revenues are a little over $80 billion. So something has to give.” And every state sector is giving — except prisons and pensions, notes Walters — including, now, our parks. So what happens to these shuttered
PH
district plans to eventually dismantle the displays of 19th and 20th century logging equipment spread across an area shaded by enormous pines. The idea has flustered members of the Timber Heritage Association, who want to develop a big timber heritage museum out on Samoa. The association’s treasurer, Mike Kellogg, said the state has not been forthcoming with details, which has fueled their fears. He said some members heard rumors that the district planned to send everything up to Del Norte County or down to the state’s railroad museum in Sacramento — including the Falk Locomotive, which according to its donation deed must be displayed locally. “They don’t talk to us,” Kellogg said. “And we don’t know why they’re sending the stuff out of the area, instead of donating it to a group that’s talking about creating a timber heritage museum right here.” Gardner said the district hasn’t decided yet what to do with the displays. Some items probably will go to a state park in Del Norte County — first into storage, where they’ll be protected, she said, and later on display in a new museum there. The district will keep other items at Fort Humboldt. The remainder will go back to donors or be found new owners locally if that’s what their deeds require. The Falk, added Gardner, won’t be sent away. The timber folks also fear loss of the Bear Harbor Gypsy Locomotive, donated to the park by the Partain family, which they heard was going to the Sacramento Railroad Museum. It is, said Gardner — to be restored, for free. After it’s restored, the museum will display it for a while and then return it to Humboldt. “Restore it for free in exchange for a little display time? That’s a great deal,” Gardner said.
and will report problems to law enforcement. It’s that instinct to protect, to do something good — demonstrated by everyone from a private inn owner to a small county to a scraggle of committed forest defenders — that created our state park system in the first place. Maybe it can save it.
When Theresa
Aubuchon was just 11 years old, the ’64 flood buried in silt the first spot where her family loved to camp, on private land by the Mattole River. She remembers how, after the flood, her mom and grandmother, the big campers in the family, chose Richardson Grove State Park as their new family summer getaway. And they went there for years, until Aubuchon was grown up, married, and had her own kids — and her mother was too frail to make the hike from the campsite down to the river anymore. “One time my mother said, ‘Let’s try Grizzly Creek,’” Aubuchon recalled recently. The Aubuchons lived in Fortuna. “I laughed and said, ‘That’s not real camping! That’s like going-up-the-street-type camping!’” But they did it, and they got hooked on the convenience. Aubuchon’s husband, Ron, could go to work during the week and camp with them on the weekends. They’d stay up till midnight playing cards and laughing. Sometimes, said Aubuchon, they’d roll her mom in her wheelchair right to edge of the river, settle an inner tube around her, and set her to sail, and then they’d catch her downstream. And now Aubuchon’s children have begun bringing their kids there for those glorious two weeks in the summer. They swim, talk to people from Japan and Europe and Wisconsin, eat Dutch oven pizzas and brown-bears-in-an-apple-orchard (an applesauce-gingerbread concoction) sleep in a tent, listen to the river. “That’s what you do in the summer,” said Theresa Aubuchon. ●
Dana Lerski
Landscaping and Tree Service Hauling Irrigation Systems Gutters Power Washing Painting
267-0627
danalerski@gmail.com northcoastjournal.com •• NORTH northcoastjournal.com NORTH COAST COAST JOURNAL JOURNAL •• THURSDAY, THURSDAY, MAY MAY 3, 3, 2012 2012
21 21