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GORGE’S HIDDEN HISTORY

The Path Less Followed Leads to Wyeth

By Tomi Owens, 2-13-06

Here, above, a scene from Gorton Creek, and the trail that passes near the now-vanished Civilian Public Service camp in Wyeth. The photo below: Deepening twilight in a rocky gorge that calls to mind the conscientious objector and poet William Everson, who wrote a poem, while interned: "To sunder the rock that is our day/In the weak light/Under high fractured cliffs.../We wait suspended in time/Locked out of our lives we abide, we endure..." Bottom photo: A cover of an issue of The Illiterati.

Tomi Owens

The rain passes reluctantly from the peaks and the parting fogs reveal a narrow declivity in the mossy hills. There, resting in the shadows, is Wyeth.

Off Interstate 84, just east of Cascade Locks, the modest Wyeth campground is now closed for the winter. Here the seldom-used Forest Service Trail 411 embarks on a steep climb from the damp, mystic gloom that envelopes Gorton Creek up to the stony heights that tower over the Columbia. Trail 411 then continues for five miles to isolated North Lake. It's a challenging, beautiful and rewarding hike.

But I don't go to hike. I go to Wyeth to reflect on its history and wonder about its future. For 60 years, the dramatic history of Wyeth has been, perhaps intentionally, lost. Nothing remains of the Civilian Public Service camp that housed conscientious objectors here from Dec. 1941 until July 1946. The story of these men who refused to fight in World War II has been buried beneath the forest loam, overgrown and forgotten. There are no monuments, no plaques, nothing. But, in a chance encounter at a San Francisco book store last August I learned of CPS Camp 21, and I have been fascinated by it ever since.

The Gorge is my home but San Francisco is my home away from home. The eclectic art and music, the cultural mix, all the hubbub — I love being surrounded by SF's cosmopolitan buzz for a weekend. Especially the frenetic corner of Broadway and Columbus where Chinatown meets Little Italy. And most especially City Lights Bookstore, that bastion of Beat poetry and leftist idealism.

I was there last summer, browsing through Ginsberg and Kerouac, and I came across a slim volume of interviews titled San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets, edited by David Meltzer. I bought the book and, after finding a sidewalk café in which to sit and read, was immersed in the history of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation as recalled by the poets themselves. I was mystified by this quote by William Everson, a founding father of counter culture:"…a good deal of what later happened in the San Francisco scene had its origin right there in Waldport." Everson had been interned in Oregon as a conscientious objector during WWII. He went on to name the Civilian Public Service Camp camp at Waldport, Ore., as a fountainhead of later social change in California. And then, even closer to home, he named CPS Camp 21 at Cascade Locks, (really Wyeth) as the birth place of the clandestine, WWII pacifist publication The Illiterati.

Wyeth is only ten miles from my front door. I began to research, seeking out texts and authors, histories and old photographs. Here is what I found:

When France fell to the Germans in the summer of 1940, Congress passed the Selective Service and Training Act by one vote. It was the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Historically, conscientious objectors to war could be exempted from a draft on the basis of training and belief. The National Board for Religious Conscientious Objectors was formed by the three traditional peace churches: Quaker (Friends), Church of the Brethren and Mennonites. This board convinced the government that instead of sending conscientious objectors (COs) to prison as draft dodgers to allow them to work in mental hospitals, volunteer for medical experiments, and to aid Forest Service projects.

Building on the Civilian Conservation Corps camp structure of the Depression era and often using CCC locations, the government created the Civilian Public Service. Smoke jumping, felling logs, clearing snags, and replanting areas of forest destroyed by clear cutting, this was the work for CO internees. Many COs were confined to the CPS camps for the duration of the war.

On December 5, 1941, CPS Camp 21 opened in Wyeth. Two days later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Conscientious objectors began to trickle into Wyeth. Highway 84 had not yet intruded on the solitude of the Columbia Gorge and wartime rations restricted travel. It was a day long bus journey from Portland to Wyeth when they ran at all. Isolated, removed from society — the deeply religious young men, often the sons of church leaders, were alone of the fringes of a vast wilderness. Most had never been far from home. Torn from their families and places of worship they offered their peace testimonies in the silent forest beneath the dark and solemn hills.

Along with the Quakers, Mennonites and Brethern there was another, smaller group of COs. Painters, writers, actors and muscians who found war unconscionable. Unwilling to participate in the war effort by lending their talents to any pro-war media they joined the CPS system. Sent from obscurity to places of greater obscurity in the wilds of Oregon, these artists turned inward, collaborated with each other, and created what art they could. They produced plays and concerts, wrote anti-war poetry , drew political cartoons, and most significantly pioneered fine art printing using the scant materials available to publish Illiterati. This zine was an attempt to reach out beyond the lonely confines of camp and link artists in the CPS system across the country. The Illiterati was printed twice in Wyeth, twice in Waldport, and, after the war, twice in Pasadena, Calif. (Postal censors, offended by a drawing of a nude woman, destroyed nearly all the copies of the first issue.) This tiny publication is mentioned again and again in the literature of subsequent developments in fine printing as a benchmark of extraordinary art produced under extreme conditions.

Meanwhile, the world was in the grip of madmen. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, dragging the U.S. into the war, and Hitler's attack on Russia, creating two fronts in Europe, were not risky war strategies or poor judgments: these were acts of insanity by men reckless with power and warped by psychosis.

San Francisco, threshold to the Pacific theater, became the most fortified place in America. The City of Love bristled with antiaircraft guns, artillery battalions and barbed wire. In the windows of nearly every business establishment ‘MEN IN UNIFORM—WELCOME’ signs were tacked. And there were other, more ominous, signs of a city absorbed in war: The Japanese-Americans had been evacuated to desolate camps, the Italian-Americans were under observation and conscientious objectors were unwelcome.

For the conscientious objectors, there was a thin line between confinement and shelter. As millions of men rushed or were drafted into the military, public sentiment for COs shifted from resentment to hostility. The press dubbed COs "conchies" and their stance for peace was widely rejected as unpatriotic. In Wyeth, these men were isolated by immense distances from mainstream America, both geographically and philosophically. And as they labored in the forests, praying or brooding, what impression did the wilds of Oregon leave on their souls? Can we now, 60 years later, discern some shadowy imprint of nature, of the Gorge perhaps, in their later works?

Perhaps — artistic inspiration is difficult to quantify. But what is certain is that the friendships forged in Wyeth and Waldport were lifelong. The artistic community orginating in these two CPS camps continued to collaborate for the years and decades that followed. And always they were preoccupied with peace.

The boys shipped off to fight in Europe and Asia returned home men, but men who had seen too much. Suffiering with horrific physical and psychological scars inflicted on them (the trauma of combat, the deprivations, the broken bodies), many returning GIs wanted more than anything to forget. They opted for the safe and secure formula provided by the GI bill and the 1950s consumer culture: wife, kids, home, car, job. Mainstream America settled into a serene suburban façade, a numbing balm for wounded souls.

Conscientious objectors were not released from CPS camps until almost a year after the Japanese surrendered. William Everson, the poet whose reminscing quote first sparked my interest in COs, was transferred from Waldport to Wyeth. He would remain confined there until June 1946 before being transferred to a desolate desert camp in California for another month and finally discharged in July. The government logic was that COs should not get jobs before returning GIs. But the government needn’t have bothered: COs found themselves largely alienated in their hometowns.

Slowly, by various indierct routes, many made their way to San Francisco. They were drawn by two factors. First, cheap housing. While the Army and Navy occupied the city, they had built modest housing for military, ship yard workers, and their families had been built. With the war over, San Francisco was empty and the rent was dirt cheap. Second, small but growing intelligensia gathereng around poet Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth had been a CO, volunteering in mental hospitals in the Bay Area, during WWII and afterwards he founded the Libertarian Circle; a pacifist gathering of not only writers, painters, and theater people, but also physicians, college professors, and engineers.

After planting trees in Oregon, COs began to sow the seeds of revolution in California. Spared from the horrors of war and repelled by post-war rigidity, this accumulation of pacifists spawned the social enlightenment called "The San Francisco Renaissance" of the late 1940s. Then in 1953, attracted by the Bohemian, intellectual atmosphere, The Beats arrived. Of the Beat Generation poet David Meltzer writes this: "Bound by birth to an earlier, book-centered tradition, they took the immediate world as their iconic text and, through their art and lives, were often consciously aware of an unarticulated imperative to sacralize and somehow repair — the broken post-war world."

And then, the Sixties. Across the Bay, the college town of Berkeley exploded in a series of student led peace demonstrations and the fragile structure and stifling artistic stasis of the Fifties was shattered. World War II COs were often asked to speak at rallies and love-ins. There were marches, protests, and everywhere you looked, change.

I go to Wyeth often these days. I walk along the banks of Gorton Creek through forests planted by poets and playwrights, pastors and preachers' sons. A mid-winter glow crests the cliffs and I follow Trail 411 higher to see the river just as William Everson did 60 years ago. This is a path less followed and a carpet of pine needles lays thick over the ruddy earth. Back in the campground, rows of bare oak and maple form a vault overhead, the leaves are still trapped in the naked branches, unformed but inevitable. The trees are patient; glistening and still. There are no monuments here. We honor those who died for peace. Should we also honor those who live for it?

The generation that surived World War II is slipping away and a new generation stands poised at the turning of the tides. They say history is written by the victors, and I like to imagine that someday the Columbia Gorge will be written into the history books as both a cradle of pacifism and a font of modern creativity. Whatever course the future takes, the events that happened in Wyeth 60 years ago are part of our history and possibly our subconscious, whether we know it or not.

Tomi Owens is a freelance writer living in Hood River, and a regular contributor to New West Columbia Gorge. She recently wrote about Hood River painter Amirra Malak.

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