I was 16 and happy to get out of school for the day. I honked my horn as the procession snaked its way out of town. Thrifty’s marquee read: FORKS WILL BE CLOSED THURSDAY, MAY 23, TO OBSERVE GOVERNMENT STUPIDITY IN OLYMPIA. The stupidity was more logging restrictions because of that goddamn owl.

I was there because everyone else was there. I was there because I was a child of a timber town, Forks, Washington. My friends and I ate donuts and beef jerky during the four-hour drive to the state capital. We talked about prom, who was riding with whom that day and what that meant for this relationship or that one. I don’t think we said a word about what we were actually doing. I don’t think we knew.

Looking back nine years later, I can’t believe they closed school so we could attend a loggers’ rally. But it helps me remember why I will always smile at the man in the cab of the log truck rumbling past me on the freeway.

Forks, a one-stoplight town on the thumbnail of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, claims to be "The Logging Capital of the World." The end of the earth, I used to think. It’s just outside the Hoh Rain Forest and 13 miles from the ocean, but I used to complain about what wasn’t there. The nearest movie theater is more than an hour away, the nearest mall three hours away. There’s one radio station, and every country song it plays is about you or someone you know.

I grew up in the woods. I named trees, climbed trees, used them as base in tag and hide-and-seek. I was always sticky with sap. My mom slathered me with mayonnaise to get it off, a remedy we discovered after nothing else worked. When I got older my friends and I went deeper into the woods to drink beer and wine coolers. A boy carved our initials in a Douglas fir.

As much as I loved trees, I knew they had to be cut to support the families of my town. Many of my classmates’ fathers were bushelers, choker setters, shake mill workers and truck drivers. Many of the boys in my classes wanted to be loggers. I thought I would marry one.

The eighties had been a booming time for Forks, a time of few restrictions and new Ford and Toyota pick-ups all around. Big timber companies came and shaved acres and acres of old growth forest. They took too much. They got greedy. This is what I know now. But they weren’t prepared for a sudden ban on logging because of the discovery of what was said to be an endangered bird, that goddamn owl.

Forks got angry. People lost their jobs and homes. Anyone in Birkenstocks was suspect. We boycotted Ben and Jerry’s and Paul Newman products, anything that supported preservation. My parents gave up the line of GE appliances they sold because they learned GE had an affiliation with the Sierra Club.

When I went to college in 1992, I wrote all of my freshman class papers about timber issues. The real endangered species are the loggers … Clearcuts aren’t forever … More than a million acres of trees are locked up in Olympic National Park that the loggers will never touch.

But I was away from Forks now. Most people I met weren’t loggers and didn’t know anyone who was.

One summer during college I interned at a newspaper on Whidbey Island, Washington. I lived with a family of Earth-loving vegetarians. We ate tofu and drank wine. We swam naked in the ocean. We slept in the yard where the rooster, the chickens and the peacock shuffled around us. I shed the blouses and blazers my mom had bought in favor of batik dresses and Birkenstocks. I subscribed to the Utne Reader. I learned to play in the woods again.

I became a vegetarian and read books and articles about factory farming. I learned about the ozone layer and soil erosion. I drew connections. Clearcutting destroys the ecosystem … It takes up to a thousand years for a natural forest to become rich and diverse.

After college I moved around and landed in Eugene, Oregon, a city full of hippies and activists and hemp products. The place, my husband says, where all VW vans come to die.

I had been here a few months when a ballot measure was introduced that would have banned clearcutting in Oregon forests. The loggers had a slick counter-campaign, "No on 64. It’s too extreme," backed up by commercials showing lush and healthy Oregon forests. I remember walking in the rain to the polling place with my husband. I was going to vote for it, I told him. "The loggers have done enough damage."

I guess I got caught up in Eugene. That night I imagined a headline in the Forks Forum:"Former Homecoming Princess Sells Out to Environmentalists."