It's Your Oregon: Brock Evans

Excerpts from: Remembrances from the conservation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s

Part I: Getting to Oregon

I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, to make it my permanent home, in the summer of 1963. Born in Ohio, educated on the East Coast (Princeton) and Midwest (University of Michigan Law School), I had never been even west of Indiana until the summer of 1961, after my first year at Law School. Because I was on a scholarship, always needing summer and winter employment, I applied for a job that summer working in a hotel in a faraway place called “Glacier National Park.”

I was pretty excited about the opportunity, and of course, I thought that the Park was located in Alaska. After all, it had glaciers in it, didn’t it?

What relevance does all this have to Oregon? Well, perhaps everything, because that experience caused two major transformations inside my deepest psyche, and therefore, of my whole future life. The initial one washed over me the very first moment I stepped out of the train from Minneapolis, at East Glacier, Montana, to begin my summer job. The first thing I saw were those mountains – those great peaks rising right out of the prairies, ice-pure creeks pouring down their flanks – from the heavens it seemed; and everywhere the sweet scent of the pine forests. It was as if some old lost chord had been plucked inside me – a music I didn’t even know was there! …and it sung to me – then and forever since – that I was now “home,” really Home. I understood at that moment, in the most profound way possible, that I could not live in Ohio any more. I must go West.

The second transformation on this journey, which was to – soon enough – take me to Oregon and the battles to save it, came a few weeks later. By then I had settled into my summer job – dining room waiter in one of the most spectacular of all the Park’s hotels, Many Glacier. While I was totally enchanted – mesmerized is a better word – to just walk around admiring the grand scene all about, it had never occurred to me that a person could actually venture into that grand and awesome-looking backcountry. Just too big, inaccessible, forbidding.

One day, while sunning myself down by the lake with new friends, some colleagues came down a trail. “Where’ve you been,” I asked. “Oh, up there,” one said – naming a place. “How’d you ever do that – that must be three miles up – and three more back… six miles in an afternoon… not possible!” was my response. Being assured that it was, I began to ponder the new opportunities thus opened up: a person actually might hike more than three miles a day and not get tired! On my next day off, I set out to test this new hypothesis; and with a group of friends, we climbed up and over the top of the Continental Divide, then down into the famous wild valley of the Belly River… and 20 miles up along it, to the Canadian border. In one day.

I didn’t know then that it was called “wilderness.” I just knew that it was beautiful and I loved it. My wanderings began right then, and by the end of a second magical summer at the hotel, I had hiked and climbed about 500 miles in Glacier, the Park termed by John Muir “the most sub-lime wilderness in North America.” My trans-formation was complete: not only must I live in the West, but I must be near mountains.

Graduation from law school the next year was fast approaching, and basic decisions had to be made: what to do? I supposed I would try to practice law somewhere… but where? For me, the answer to that question now had become the most important decision of all the rest of my life. Montana? Rumors were that only graduates of the Law School in Missoula could ever hope to make it past the favoritism of that state’s Bar Examiners. California – still known as “Golden California” at the time? The fees to even just take the Bar Exam there were too steep for my skimpy budget. How about the Pacific Northwest then? I had already visited once – Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 – so what about there? It was a place I knew a little, and it was beautiful. The Bar Exam fee was within my reach. Best of all, Seattle had a mountain range on each side, and salt water in the middle, this last being important to my wife, who hailed from the Boston area. It all just seemed to come together, so out we drove across the country to make it our new home, in June 1963.

My first summer of climbing and hiking reinforced my feeling that I had arrived in some kind of Paradise. Often I would sit on top of some peak in the North Cascades gazing in awe across its vast wild sweep of mountain-tops in every direction, and think to myself, “hey, I could climb one of these every week-end of my life and never know them all…oh what joy!”

That kind of pure happiness lasted just about two summers, because then I noticed some-thing strange and disturbing happening out there in my beloved mountain wilderness. I had become especially enchanted by the northwest forest – so like fairylands, huge trunks reaching to the sky, many streams dancing across a forest floor carpeted with moss and ferns. I had never before experienced any forests like these, and I loved them too, as much as the great peaks I climbed. But, as I most painfully began to discover, they were being destroyed. Trail after trail I would wander through the summer before, and dream about all the next winter, was gone – just gone, vanished in a sea of muddy clearcuts, the former delightful pathways morphed and bulldozed into an ugly mess of logging roads.

I was stunned, full of pain and anger from that moment. Thus began my third – and final – transformation. It started me off on a very different path, one that would soon take me to Oregon and the battles just beginning or not yet joined in that beautiful part of my adopted homeland, the Pacific Northwest. I vowed at that moment to give the rest of my life and career to defend the places I loved.

Thousands of other people, often newcomers like myself who had moved in from damaged and polluted places, were also appalled at what was happening, here too. Even worse, we were dismayed at what more was being planned by The Powers That Be. If we who cared did nothing, so much of what we had come here for would be destroyed too. If we did nothing. Heart and soul, I burned with a fire of passion to fight back, and with an intensity every bit as deep as those first stirrings of awe and ‘homecoming’ that had swept over me at Glacier Park just a few years before.

Not knowing what else to do, I became a very active citizen volunteer – there were no paid people then to do what we all called the “conservation work.” This work meant rescuing forests, rivers, urban parks and vistas, shorelines. No place, it seemed, was to be spared from the sprawl, pavement, and logging tsunamis being promoted by the developers who controlled the state legislature. Remember that there were no environmental laws at that time: no NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act), no ESA (Endangered Species Act). Those were years away, so there were no legal remedies such as we have now. Going to court then, during those earliest struggles, was not an option.