District Ranger Holman,

I want to tell you what 
Oregon State Police's file shows, what that March visit did to me, and what your letter did. This is a personal letter. It asks for nothing.

On March 3, an OPRD manager sent an email to Oregon State Police about me. It said "Fyi." It said my letters were now reaching the Governor. That was the whole reason. It went to the captain of their press office, and by the next morning he had ordered a threat
assessment "asap." A detective on the Portland FBI task force sent my name to FBI personnel. A state fusion center started documenting me. They pulled my driver's record. They entered me into their dispatch system as a Suspect with the written basis of "publicly
airing grievances." They gathered my work schedule and a description of my Jeep. They took satellite photos of the work center and pinned my RV so they could find my door, because my home has no address. [District staff] was told not to tell me any of it was happening.
They wrote a plan titled "knock and talk" with my name on it. Their own detective had already read my archive and written that nothing stood out. They came anyway --three of them, through the gate -- on the one-year anniversary of my dismissal. Afterward their
report said what they knew before they drove: no threats, no violence, no crime. And the dispatch record said the visit was "FOR THE FOREST SERVICE."

All of that, over a letter, with an FYI.

Here is what it did to me.

I lived in fear of them coming back. For months, every day, at the work center and on the trails and at my own door, I carried the knowledge that armed men had come through a locked gate to reach me once and could do it again. I built a technological "dead
man's switch" that would trigger a video on the archive I created if I went missing — in case they came back and followed through on their implied threats and locked me up with no one to help me.

I want to be clear about what that fear was and wasn't: it was never going to stop me from living my life, and it was never going to stop me from telling the truth. It didn't. But I lived with it.

Then you wrote your letter. You stated plainly that the Forest Service did not initiate the interview, that its role was access, and that you didn't know why the record said what it said. That letter is the thing that let my nervous system finally relax. Not
time. Not distance. Your letter. Someone with authority over the ground I live on told the truth about what happened on it, and my body believed you.

I asked if I was safe here and no one would answer me, until you finally did, and it mattered more than you'll ever know.

Thank you for your integrity. It is an honor to serve you and the forest.

Sam