Road to the Outhouse

“I’m not objective, and I don’t want to come across as attacking anyone,” Flora told me. “But I’m extremely disappointed with the actions of the Forest Service. I think you’ll find it is lack of intestinal fortitude characterizing the choices that are being made. I find it appalling. I think a lot of the heavy work was done already as far as establishing a position and gathering the research and saying, ‘Look, this is where it’s at; this is what the land is telling us; this is what our research says the fish are telling us.’”

Flora and her staff were supposed to be managing 6.5 million acres in the largest national forest south of Alaska. Instead they were forced to spend most of their energy and resources responding to temper tantrums in Elko County. “These people were demanding a ridiculous amount of our time,” she says. “I cannot be a land steward if I’m constantly reacting to these people.”

When she was still on the job Flora informed the press and her superiors about how her people were “castigated in public, shunned in [their] communities, refused service in restaurants, kicked out of motels . . . or had their very lives threatened.” Specific incidents included: a Forest Service spouse who for six years was sworn at and screamed at whenever she walked her son to the bus stop; a Forest Service mine inspector who was nearly run over by a dozer operator; and an employee who was detained and harassed by police because a tail light burned out on a trailer as he was towing it. “One of the sadder things I remember,” she says, “was having a woman tell me she was so tired of having her children come home from school and say, ‘Mommy, why does everyone hate you?’ I saw significant health problems related to stress. These are not happy people; they’ve quit socializing within the community. They avoid wearing Forest Service uniforms. I watched the unraveling of their self esteem.” In just the 18 months Flora was in Nevada 60 of her 200 co-workers left.

That was considered a grand victory in Elko County, where District Attorney Gary Woodbury recommended in writing that the county run radio and newspaper ads that expose all manner of imagined federal misconduct and conclude with: “This message is brought to you by the Elko County Commission who encourages you to let the Forest Service know what you think about this by not cooperating with them. Don’t sell goods or services to them until they come to their senses.”

The Forest Service has brought a lot of the abuse on itself by groveling. According to TU’s Matt Holford, “the big disconnect” is at the agency’s regional office. “Gloria and [Forest Service chief] Dombeck came in during the middle of all this,” he says. “They’ve both been great. People in DC are talking right; people on the ground are talking right. But we don’t get anything from Blackwell, which is weird because he signed the appeal. You don’t need to be heavy handed and tell people what to do, but when they don’t want to work for a solution sometimes you have to break off. Blackwell won’t do that. He’s trying to negotiate with the devil, and he’s giving the county false hope that the road is going to be reopened. We’ve already learned through the appeal and all the scientific data that the National Environmental Policy Act says that road’s going to stay closed.”

But is it? Could it be that one day all Americans—toting their own toilet paper, of course—will be able to drive the 11/2 miles to the outhouse? That’s the big dream in Elko County, Nevada, a land where, more often than not, the most impressive ruminations come from cows. According to the Elko Daily Free Press, if you can believe it—and you can’t—Humboldt-Toiyabe supervisor Vaught announced in August that “he favors moving forward” with rebuilding the road to the outhouse. (Vaught didn’t return my phone calls, but his public-affairs person reckons he was probably misquoted.) Assemblyman John Carpenter — chosen by the people of Elko in seven consecutive elections to represent them in the state legislature—says the road closure amounts to nothing less than discrimination against the handicapped and that it is illegal under the Americans With Disabilities Act. According to Jarbidge attorney Robert Buckalew, “Bull trout can be raised in fish hatcheries just like whooping cranes and other endangered species” and besides, they “eat salmon eggs and cannibalize their own young.”

Speaking for Elko County in its ongoing fed-bashing rallies is Helen Wilson who, at 90, is Jarbidge’s oldest resident. “Ah, pooh!” she told High Country News. “I’ve caught lots of those Dolly Vardens. What do they worry about them for? They’re ugly. They’re soft. They’re not good eating.”

Other than Nevada TU, the Fish and Wildlife Service and Gloria Flora, no one is aggressively defending the bull trout of the Jarbidge River. And yet they are a genetic treasure—ugly to the locals perhaps, but beautiful to anyone who looks at them with clear vision and a refined taste in natural objects. Had one never listened to the people of Elko County, one might have supposed that they would cherish their bull trout the way Californians cherish their giant sequoias.