The letter was gloriously blunt, but Ms. Wester was hardly alone in her feelings - the proposal has evoked strong protest around the country and in Congress.

The recipient's response, however, was a bit out of the ordinary: Rey flew to Carteret County to defend the proposal before Dave Holland's sixth-grade science classes Thursday morning.

The media center of the Broad Creek Middle School briefly took on the aspect of a Congressional hearing room as Rey, flanked by uniformed forest rangers from the Croatan (CROW-uh-tan) National Forest, set about explaining his beleaguered proposal even while emphasizing that it is likely to be revised to make it politically palatable. He told a dubious young audience sitting cross-legged on the floor that the sale was designed to help raise $500 million to $1 billion to pay for rural schools in heavily forested counties like theirs. But he said the amount of land likely to be actually sold to raise the needed money would be cut to nearly half, or 175,000 acres.