Fjord-like Hood Canal channels beneath the snowcapped Olympic National Park, creating a summer paradise of warm days and inspiring scenery as well as a haven for marine life and watercraft. For eons, Twana Indians crisscrossed in canoes that sliced through water like salmon. The canal’s first tourist, Captain Vancouver, sailed a launch down the scenic route in 1792. For the next century, a mosquito fleet of tugboats, stern-wheelers, fishing boats, and barges ferried the men who came for logging or land. By 1889, lumberman and legislator John McReavy promoted Union City as “Venice of the Pacific.” In the 20th century, canal use shifted from logging to recreation as wealthy Easterners, San Francisco expatriates, and artists founded hunting lodges, fishing resorts, and even an artist colony. The Navy Yard Highway introduced automobile tourism, and new resorts, including Alderbrook, soon dotted the shoreline. After World War II, families bought summer homes and ski boats. Now, in the 21st century, kayaks and personal watercraft skim across the waters, and the canal is more popular than ever.

Hood Canal (WA) (Images of America)

Arts & Photography

Fredson, Michael

Photography & Video

Arcadia Publishing

Beast-man: A historical of John Tornow : hermit, outlaw & murderer on the Olympic Peninsula (1911-1933)

Mason County Historical Society

In 1946, the US Forest Service and Simpson Logging Company agreed to a sustained yield unit, cooperatively managing lands for 100 years for "community stability." Championed by USFS chief William Greeley and dubbed the "Sustained Steal" by detractors, the Shelton Cooperative Sustained Yield Unit nonetheless provided jobs for returning World War II veterans. Simpson Logging built the largest logging camp in the continental United States, Camp Grisdale, which had a two-room school and a two-lane bowling alley. Shelton and McCleary were saved from becoming ghosts towns, and downtown Shelton was modernized with a shopping center, parks, and schools. Mason County's Forest Festival was a weekend celebration for 30,000 visitors that included a parade and logging shows. As the only cooperative unit established in the United States, it attracted national attention, including TV personality Arthur Godfrey. In 1961, the movie Ring of Fire was filmed above Camp Grisdale. As World War II memories faded, logging practices were challenged by notions of wilderness and recreation. Improved equipment reduced the jobs, and when Simpson withdrew from the sustained yield agreement, employees were disenfranchised.

Logging in Mason County: 1946-1985 (Images of America)

In 1946, the US Forest Service and Simpson Logging Company agreed to a sustained yield unit, cooperatively managing lands for 100 years for "community stability." Championed by USFS chief William Greeley and dubbed the "Sustained Steal" by detractors, the Shelton Cooperative Sustained Yield Unit nonetheless provided jobs for returning World War II veterans. Simpson Logging built the largest logging camp in the continental United States, Camp Grisdale, which had a two-room school and a two-lane bowling alley. Shelton and McCleary were saved from becoming ghosts towns, and downtown Shelton was modernized with a shopping center, parks, and schools. Mason County's Forest Festival was a weekend celebration for 30,000 visitors that included a parade and logging shows. As the only cooperative unit established in the United States, it attracted national attention, including TV personality Arthur Godfrey. In 1961, the movie Ring of Fire was filmed above Camp Grisdale. As World War II memories faded, logging practices were challenged by notions of wilderness and recreation. Improved equipment reduced the jobs, and when Simpson withdrew from the sustained yield agreement, employees were disenfranchised.

Logging in Mason County: 1946-1985

Arcadia Publishing Library Editions

I love the fluidity of memory and identity in Still Looking for Neuzil because both are pungent with terror and love. Time is against the speaker because he is against himself as movingly as the speakers in the best dark Coleridge poems. The veteran de-creates the world and the self in an attempt, however desperate, to make peace with "Being Back in the World." In Fredson's poems this hopeful and disheartening mantra burns far into the 21st Century. Still Looking for Neuzil should receive the fanfare of a book like Catch 22 if "Americans in the 21st Century still have the capacity to feel. I consider the terse, obsessive quality of this book, and, though it is not fashionable to quote Arthur Rimbaud, I will: Fredson's book fulfills Rimbaud's exhortation that a visionary must sustain "a long, boundless, systematized disorganization of the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness." -Rich Lyons, Author of Un Poco Loco This is a book about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Mike offers us a powerful voice that at once becomes poetry as therapy. He takes us into the horrors of the Vietnam War and its lifelong psychological cost to him through a direct and deeply personal exploration of war trauma. He doesn't speak about his PTSD; he speaks from it. This book is a gift to all soldiers who live in the dissonance between war and civilian life, as well as the psychotherapists who work with them. -Angelina Renes, Psychotherapist If war poetry, or, more specifically, the poetry of soldiering, has focused on experiences within war-its moments of no return, of being at peak intensity or in the contrasting troughs of waiting, of intgrospection-then Fredson's poems aim at something else: the life sentence of veteran-ship. Still Looking for Neuzil is a longitudinal reckoning with the fifty years since Fredson's service in the Vietnam-American War. The war continues to kill well beyond any theater of combat. Ghosts crowd out family. The instinct to disguise oneself as human, day in and day out, after such utter de-humanization, is obscene. The war wears through, always, eventually. The speaker's life is overwhelmed by his service timed and by the war, even as the war is forgotten or revised in our national and popular memory. Still Looking for Neuzil is crucial reading in a country now permanently at war. -Sarah Vap, author of Winter: Effulgences and Devotions

Still Looking for Neuzil

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Finishing Line Press

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Books by Fredson, Michael