Book Review: The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain

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The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain is easily one of the most electrifying and enlightening books I have ever read. It is the work of Teresa Platt, writing as T.H. Platt.

Platt meant it when she dedicated her novel to “the rebels among us and those who work on land and at sea.”

She had been one of the rebels for years as radical environmentalists secured a death grip on forestry, farming, cattle ranching, mining, energy development and commercial fishing - every natural resource-based company in the United States.

The big ones got bigger and the smaller family-owned companies were crushed. I know this story well because I lived through it on the forestry side.

After overreaching federal regulations negatively impacted the high-seas fishery and its fishing community of which Teresa’s family was part, she moved into government affairs with a focus on fishing, agriculture and property rights. She spent time at a DC think tank and returned to San Diego where she helped guide several local campaigns to success.

Needing quiet and less urbanized surroundings, Teresa left southern California, moved to the Pacific Northwest and then to Europe.

A few years ago, she contacted me. She was renting a tiny place in the countryside of Southwestern France where forestry and farming thrive in small rural enclaves that date back hundreds of years. Teresa asked if I would join a small group of First Readers. These people were scattered around the planet and acting as a sounding board for a novel she was finishing about a fictional logging and sawmilling family living on the timber-rich Olympic Peninsula in western Washington.

Although her book is fictional, it is a gripping tale brimming with truth, reflecting an enormous amount of research and thought. The result is The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, a magnificent story that she plans—if she can get past the Gatekeepers of Narrative—to translate into multi-language audio books, a visual series or a movie. If you have the means, this is a project worth supporting.

The novel’s lead characters are Jackson Armstrong, a logger and lumberman in the fictional town of Silvercreek on the Olympic Peninsula and Grace Newman, a Los Angeles Tribune environmental reporter who we meet at a fundraising gala staged by environmental activists who are hell-bent on “saving” ancient forests from “greedy” loggers.

Grace is on a first-name basis with the leaders of every group. They trust her and expect her to write another glowing account of their globally-funded effort to bring resource industries to heel, a process that often forces the small, local players to sell out.

As her writing aligns with the official narrative, her career advances. In Chapter 3, Thoughts from Thoreau, we find Grace moderating an evening panel discussion at UCLA’s Royce Hall. All of the panelists are environmentalists except Jackson Armstrong, a well-spoken logger from mythical Silver Creek, a rural logging community on the Olympic Peninsula.

Armstrong is a University of Washington graduate with degrees in forest management and silviculture – a third-generation logger and lumberman with a powerful message. In his remarks, he quotes Henry David Thoreau, the leading naturalist, poet and essayist best known for Civil Disobedience and Walden.

To the amazement and anger of a packed house, Jackson uses Thoreau passages to emphasize his arguments in favor of forest management and logging, the use of wood and the role of fire.

Teresa’s teeth-gritting description of the ensuing melee is priceless. It captures every phony argument radical environmentalists have been using since the early days of the Great Spotted Owl War.

Grace is clearly shaken by what she sees and hears before Armstrong calmly walks out of the auditorium amid hissing, booing and a shower of plastic bottles thrown his direction.

Alone following the meeting, she collects herself on a park bench outside the auditorium. “‘Damn that man,’ muttered Grace as she inhaled the cool evening air. It smelled of engine exhaust and eucalyptus.”

Hoping to calm the political waters, Grace’s editor sends her to Silvercreek to seek out the bad actors, the timber people. Grace arrives via jet from LA, seaplane and a bus that takes her to her ramshackle hotel on the outskirts of Silvercreek where Jackson Armstrong is waiting for her at the check-in counter. He insists she stay at his family’s compound and she reluctantly agrees.

Exploring the timber business on the Olympic Peninsula, Grace soon realizes nothing she’s been told about “neanderthal” loggers is true, especially Jackson Armstrong, who she quietly admires for his calm and competent demeanor, his scarred and calloused hands, his intelligence. This is a man’s man.

Jackson introduces Grace to Ginny Anderson, director of the Yellow Ribbon Alliance, a grassroots group determined to hold the line against environmentalists they cannot possibly defeat. If you have even half a heart Ginny’s description of life in Silvercreek will bring tears to your eyes. Many unemployed loggers can’t afford to feed their families. Ginny does the best she can with handouts while battling court and political maneuverings by powerful forces.

The side-of-the-road discussion between Jackson and Grace enroute to the Armstrong house in the Chapter 5, Silvercreek, is moving on many fronts. It reveals the author’s passion for truth, a trait we both share that rarely appears in news media reports - even now, 34 years after the federal government listed the Northern Spotted Owl as a threatened species, a first step in destroying the rural economies in more than 200 western communities.

Grace soon discovers that Jackson Armstrong is an open book – no different than he was at UCLA’s Royce Hall. There is nothing about the destruction of Silvercreek that he is unwilling or unable to discuss with her.

Grace tours the Armstrong sawmill, which dates from shortly after the Civil War but has undergone numerous upgrades and takes a helicopter tour of a selective logging operation. The helicopter ride proves to be a life changing experience for her. I won’t give away the plot. You’ll need to read it for yourself.

Silently at first, doubts begin to creep into Grace’s mind. Who did this? Who are
the Silvercreek people? Who is this man? And what is the real story here?

Teresa’s story takes the reader around the world and into the halls of power. It has everything: intrigue, romance, sex, murder, treachery, betrayal and an inside look at the billionaire cult aspiring to control every acre of land on earth.

You can read The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain online at Substack.com (send a contribution to support her writing!) and buy the eBook and print versions at Amazon and Barnes and Noble – and you will definitely want one for your permanent library.

It is one helluva story, very well told by someone who lived it here in the United States before she turned several pages in her life to live quietly and write hidden away in the medieval villages of Southwestern France.