By Bill Varble

Jeff Golden admits his new novel about the Northwest timber wars is a Trojan horse.

"If I wrote an essay, three-quarters of the 45 people who would read it might like it," he says. "I want to provoke some thought."

"Forest Blood" (Wellstone Press, $15) figures to do that and then some. It wraps big issues into a roaring yarn.

Into the war over the remains of the temperate rain forest that once covered the Pacific Northwest Golden plunks the fictional Jack Gilliam, a third-generation logger who becomes the war's most famous casualty. As a corporate raider ratchets up the cut, Jack is pulled into a high-stakes conflict that explodes into violence. Throw in timber people, environmentalists, politicians and reporters, all trying to use Jack for their own ends in the super-heated atmosphere of a full-blown media frenzy.

Fiction it is, and maybe it ain't.

Whatever else it is, it's turf Golden knows. A Jackson County commissioner from 1987 to 1991, he was targeted for recall in 1989 by angry logging supporters who said he didn't support the industry. The recall failed.

Golden gave up his commissioner's seat to make an unsuccessful run for the state Senate, then worked as State Sen. Bill Bradbury's top aide before returning to the Rogue Valley to work on his book.

Readers can check out the first chapter of "Forest Blood" at www.mind.net/forestblood .

Golden plans an author tour in March that will take him through Oregon, Washington and Northern California -- the same Pacific Northwest against which the book's story plays out.

Some Southern Oregonians may think they recognize people and places in the story. It unfolds in 1994 in "Lewis Falls," one of the last of the company towns. Poised at the edge of change, it resembles, say, a Butte Falls, but transplanted to the Coast Range. That's on the road to "Port Douglas," a coastal logging and fishing town that's seen better days.

For generations, the forest around Lewis Falls was logged at more or less sustainable levels by Lewsco, a local outfit with ties to the community. But responsible stewardship goes out the window when a corporate high roller takes over the company and starts raping the forest to pay off the debt he incurred to finance the takeover.

Some readers may think of (real) people such as Harold Simmons, who bought Medco, or James Hurwitz, whose Maxxam Corp., the parent of Pacific Lumber, wants to log some of the last ancient redwoods in California. It was in part outrage at the effects of leveraged buyouts that spurred Golden to write the book.

"Buying community-based companies and retiring your junk bond debt by liquidating the forest is sort of the ultimate symbol of capitalism run amok," he says.

He says most of the main characters are composites, not real people, although readers may disagree.

Hank Snow, a Medco executive during Golden's tenure on the commission, says he probably won't be buying the book.

"I kind of like Jeff, but he's slanted," Snow says. "I'd probably get mad."

Snow says timber companies cut more on private land mainly because the cut was reduced on public lands.

"It sounds to me like he's talking about Medco," Snow says. He says in trying to fight off Simmons' 1984 acquisition, Medco may have been partly responsible for Simmons' corporate raider image as a "Texas gunslinger." But even then Medco wasn't local; it was controlled by a Chicago company.

Snow says Medco's cut did go up in the '80s, but the trees came from 80,000 acres Medco bought before Simmons took over, not from raping its old land.

Have Oregon trees paid off Texas junk bonds?

"Oregon trees have paid off debt everywhere," Snow says.

Golden, 48, lives in Ashland. He works as a mediator and is a talk show host on Jefferson Public Radio. He grew up around Los Angeles, went to Harvard, dropped out (he later earned a master's degree in broadcasting from Stanford) and lived with a sharecropping family in Georgia, the source of his first book, "Watermelon Summer" (1971).

He lived outside Butte Falls in the 1970s, managed a small woodlot, worked as a carpenter and wrote a novel that was never published because, he says, "it was bad."

A photo of him from the "Watermelon Summer" days, long-haired and bearded, was circulated by recall supporters trying paint him as a counterculture extremist. He says he always figured the photo backfired.

He says he came to believe that the opposing sides in the wars were two cultures, each without a clue what the other is about.

His sympathy for working people in the timber community comes through strongly.

"It (working in the woods) penetrates people's sense of who they are," he says. "It's a harsh life that few would dream of giving up, at least before 1980 or so."

His anger is focused on industry fat cats and the political system he says cooperated in the devastation of the ancient forest through an old-boy system of corporate welfare.

In the background of the novel is the public, not so much stupid or naive as distracted by the demands of everyday life.

Environmentalists and media types come in for some lumps, too.

"Forest Blood" may give Golden a soapbox, but he says friends helped him focus on the story, by pursuading him to cut a lot of flab out of early drafts.

"I realized I had more interest in the culture of this logging community than other people," he says.

Golden says he put his draft down for six months, and it looked different when he picked it up again, making the editing easier.