Club Seeks to Thin Woods It Camps In

Sometime in the 1980s, campers at a Bohemian Grove encampment return aboard a shuttle bus. (Copyright 1997 By Kerry Richardson)

"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."