254 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
the staff at the Quinault District of the Olympic National Forest got its
first look at the new habitat protection circles mandated for the Northern
Spotted Owl, they crunched the numbers and braced for a shock wave.^2
“They told us the cut would be only 42 million board feet,” Carlson
recalls. It got very quiet for what seemed like minutes. The room was
thunderstruck. Tom Mayr, who was running the family sawmill in Ho-
quiam, had heard about the spotted owl a couple of years earlier at an in-
dustry meeting, and “it was kinda like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah.’” Now he real-
ized that the future would be “survival of the fittest.” Then Rex Holloway,
a Forest Service official, told them 42 million was the good news. The bad
news was how low it could go. Within the next few years they’d probably
be lucky to get 20 million board feet.^3
Monte Dahlstrom departed with his mind reeling, anger and frustra-
tion mounting with every mile as he headed back to town. “This will be
economic devastation for Grays Harbor,” he told editors at The Daily
World. “It will be a different place to live.” For a while, they thought he
was exaggerating.^4
Gorton was caught off guard, too. He was campaigning to reclaim his
seat when federal Judge Thomas Zilly ruled that the government’s deci-
sion to not list the owl for protection under the Endangered Species Act,
as environmentalists were demanding, was “arbitrary and capricious.”^5
Two weeks after the Forest Service broke the news to the mill owners,
a delegation from the Grays Harbor Chamber of Commerce arrived in
D.C. to deliver petitions signed by 5,000 locals who believed the Forest
Service plan would decimate timber country. Gorton, McGavick and Heidi
Biggs, the senator’s legislative assistant for natural resources, listened in-
tently for more than hour, which impressed LeRoy Tipton, the Chamber
president. “Slade wasn’t even in his permanent office yet. They went
around and scrounged chairs for us from other offices. We told him we
stood to lose thousands of jobs when you factor in the multiplier from
each job dependent on timber dollars. Slade was shocked that they were
just pulling the rug out from under us. It was clear to me—to all of us, I
think—that he was going to be our champion.”^6
“There is no way to overstate the way in which this issue radicalized
Slade,” says McGavick. “And the environmentalists had made it easy for
him by attacking him in the ’86 campaign after he did so much to in-
crease the wilderness. It seemed like spotted owl issues took up most of
every day for many of us. It changed the dynamic for Slade in a very posi-
tive way, though as the state drifted more urban it limited his upside and
made each election a fight from the start.”