| Super elites hideout remodels forest { May 18 2008 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/17/AR2008051701293.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/17/AR2008051701293.html
Club Seeks to Thin Woods It Camps In Exclusive Group Wants the Cash
By Karl Vick Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, May 18, 2008; A02
MONTE RIO, Calif. -- At the end of the lane across the Russian River from this north-woods town, behind the "Keep Out" signs and the plainclothes security guards, lies Bohemian Grove, a mysterious summer playground of presidents, former presidents, princes, Cabinet members and titans of industry. The most exclusive men's club in the world gathers each July for a secret conclave that begins with a nocturnal ceremony featuring torches, incantations, hooded robes of red velvet and the incineration of a coffin beneath a massive sculpture of an owl.
Immense power and staggering wealth are as deeply imbedded in the traditions of the Bohemian Club as they are in the grove itself, 100 acres of old-growth redwoods spared from timber companies a century ago in the name of preservation.
Which only deepens the dismay that has greeted the club's request to the state of California for permission to log as much as 1 million board feet from the place to raise some cash.
"I guess the only thing you can say about that is how the mighty have fallen -- trees to follow," said Harry Shearer, a comedic actor who made a film, "Teddy Bears' Picnic," lampooning the grove, where he was a guest in the mid-1990s.
"They've always fetishized the trees," Shearer said. "It's sort of surprising that it's gone from this object of fetishistic adoration to a cash cow."
Club President Jay Mancini said that, like so much about the Bohemians, the effort to secure a non-industrial timber management plan is widely misunderstood.
"Not secretive. We're private. And there is a difference," he said of what began in the late 1800s as a San Francisco society of journalists and writers, including Jack London. The group invited business tycoons to stay solvent, and bought the grove to spare it from the lumber companies clear-cutting to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire.
In fact, fear of fire drives the effort to "selectively log" the club's 2,700 acres, Mancini said. He said income from timber sales of Douglas fir and other non-redwood will go toward clearing undergrowth and other "ladder" foliage that could lead to a dangerous crown fire. In the clearings, the club is planting redwood saplings.
"We're trying to re-create the forest of 1900, in a sense," he said. "Redwood is much more fire-resistant."
Forestry officials concur, and appear inclined to approve the plan, once the club transfers control of the old-growth trees to a conservation group.
"It is also well to remember that the Grove is held in near religious regard by the membership," reads one of scores of letters club members have written to the agency, "and that any mishandling of this property and subsequent long term damage will necessarily expose the club's Powers That Be to humiliation of the most polite and enduring sort."
The mostly blue-collar neighbors, who fill many of the 600 jobs that serve some of the 1,500 well-heeled campers during the three weeks the grove is open, appear inclined to go along. Mancini led several dozen locals on a tour last week, and said he persuaded the only two skeptics.
"Good people in there to work for," said a local carpenter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the value the club places on discretion. "They're just in there having fun, like the rest of us do on our weekends or on vacation."
Mary Moore, who in the 1980s organized protests outside the main gate, to draw attention to elected officials bunking with corporate officers, said: "They don't tend to foul their own nest. Now, it's no big deal. Meaning, I think it was news to the American population, the effect of corporate influence on our government. But George Bush has made that kind of obvious."
Still, the local Sierra Club opposes the plan. "If anybody could afford to manage for fire danger, the Bohemian Club ought to be able to afford it without taking down trees," chapter official Jay Holcomb said.
And a former Bohemian is foursquare opposed, with discreet funding from unnamed current members. John Hooper resigned in 2004 after "promoting disharmony in the Club," as a warning letter from the then-president termed his rabblerousing over matters of forest management: "In a word it is un-Bohemian."
Hooper, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather were Bohemians, said that he misses the camaraderie and music, but that on forestry matters he considers the club "kind of a microcosm of the Bush administration.
"The Healthy Forests initiative in the national forests promoted by President Bush is a free license by the lumber industry to log," he said. "The Bohemian Club's initiative is almost its own Healthy Forests initiative."
Naming Donald H. Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George H.W. Bush, Paul D. Wolfowitz, John R. Bolton and Newt Gingrich as recent guests, Hooper said: "There's a flavor. If you were invited to a three-day weekend at the grove, it would be hard not to feel that you were surrounded by the current administration and its close cronies."
The suggestion recalls the days when hippies blockaded the compound "to keep the greed from spreading." Intrepid journalists sneaked in undercover but usually emerged disappointed.
"Underground sex torture chambers? No," said Peter Phillips, a sociologist at Sonoma State University who wrote his dissertation on the Bohemians from field notes scribbled during visits. "Prostitutes in the grove? No. There's a camp that's gay, but they don't talk about it very much. A wink and a nod."
He was interviewed in a campus office papered with leftist posters of every description but reported nothing unsettling except the "very bizarre" spectacle of the opening bonfire, when the effigy of "Dull Care" is ceremoniously cremated to officially free the workaholics from the outside world. Some members laugh aloud.
"There's no sinister thing," he said. "It's a place they can go and see the same guys and talk about their prostates and talk about their wives and whatever.
"It's really just a big fraternity party, except these guys are really powerful."
Shearer said the biggest shock was the strength of the drinks members pressed on a visitor to the assorted camps, which range from simple tented enclaves to the posh cabins of "Cave Man," where Richard M. Nixon stayed.
"To me, it was just peculiar and funny and in a way sad, because you've reached the pinnacle of power and money and you could do anything you want in your spare time, and what they choose is reliving your sophomore year at a higher price point," he said.
Not that their critics have it all figured out, either, Shearer conceded.
"It's not like they have to go away to control the world. That's the problem with that fantasy, that they have to go to California to run the world. I think they can do that pretty well from their desks."
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
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