Looking for work, I hit the road
On a cold wet dawn in October of 1972, in my twenty-second year, my wife Vickie dropped me off on a lonely stretch of highway outside of Rockford, Illinois. We had hit a rocky patch, made worse by the fact that, as I had been on the losing end of a long and bitter strike, I was now out of work and had been unable to find a job for some weeks. I had heard there were logging and mill jobs to be had for the asking on the northwest coast, and rather than spend a winter on the unemployment line, I thought I would hit the highway and take my chances. I was wearing jeans, a levi jacket, stocking hat and boots, and had an extra change of clothes in old WWII seabag which had once belonged to an uncle. Stuffed in with my clothes were a few books: Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, some poems by Gary Snyder, stories by Jack London, and translations of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North and Han Shan’s Cold Mountain Poems. 
Vickie pulled the volkswagon off the pavement and stopped. I opened my door and got out, hoisting the seabag from the back seat. She leaned over for a last hug and one long kiss, then drove back down the highway with a wave. I would never see her again.
My grandfather’s year-long ramble through the West in 1912
In 1912, at the age of twenty-one, my grandfather had hit the road with ten dollars in his pocket and headed west, taking a year to make the round from Mexico to California to the Pacific Northwest, where he stayed long enough to help bring in the wheat harvest by driving a team of forty-odd mules hitched to one of those huge early combines. When he returned he still had ten dollars. When in late 1974 I talked to my grandfather shortly before his death, I was able to report that I had done him one better: that I had left for the great West with five dollars in my pocket and had returned with nothing. He laughed aloud.
Reaching the Pacific Northwest, I ride in a logging truck
My most memorable rides both occured in Oregon. The first took place outside of Salem when a log trucker picked me up in an empty rig. He was perhaps in his thirties, with his three- or four-year-old son standing beside him, between the seats and behind the gear-shifts. We tore off down the highway, the driver crashing though a whole sequence of gear-changes with one stick, then shifting the other stick and crashing the whole sequence again, though this time on a higher level. I lost track of how many gears there were altogether, but he went through them like a swordsman executing some flawless, intricate drill at high speed. He asked where I was headed and I said straight to the ocean, then north as far as I could go without bumping into Canada. Up by Forks, then, he said. Looking for work? Yes, I said. Well, he laughed, you’ll find it all right, all you want.
Spending the night with an Indian family
By the end of the day I was in deep forest, the highway a straight two-lane bounded on both sides by hemlocks so tall that overhead there was only a narrow ribbon of stars directly over the highway. There seemed to be no lights anywhere for miles. I had never before found myself immersed in such pitch blackness. I lost track of how long I stood there, waiting for a single car to pass. Eventually, however, one approached and I put out my thumb. To my astonishment it pulled over. When I got into his car I saw by his profile and coloring that he was probably American Indian. We drove awhile in silence before he spoke. You won’t find any rides out here at this hour, he said. There won’t be any traffic till morning. You’d better come home with me. After a while we pulled off the highway and followed a narrow one-lane dirt road for some distance before pulling up in front of a large, handsome log house. I got out, shouldered my seabag and followed him inside. The first thing I saw hanging from the wall were some uniform jackets, caps and holstered pistols, all hanging from pegs. My host was a highway patrolman! He led me upstairs to a small attic room with a single bed, and told me to settle in and get some sleep. Early the next morning, before sunup, he awakened me and told me to come down as soon as I was ready. When I appeared in his kitchen, I was invited to sit down to breakfast with him and his family, a pretty Indian woman and small child. Afterwards he drove me back out to a crossroads, a little further down the highway from where he had picked me up. This will be a good place, he told me. You won’t have to wait long. And then he drove off. He had never told me his name, nor asked mine. This was when it hit me for the first time that I had entered a different country from what I had ever known.
The Olympic Peninsula
It was a full day’s travel (and waiting by the road) before I made it up into the fabled Olympic Peninsula. To a boy raised among midwestern cornfields, it was like arriving on the doorstep of Alaska. Breathing the clear rain-washed air was like drinking doubleshots: it was loaded with oxygen, smelled bracingly of cedar and left me intoxicated. As for the country, it was monumental. Staggering beauty with horrible destruction everywhere in its midst, as though I had finally stumbled into heaven itself, only to find that heaven was a war zone.
Riding up Highway 101 on a cold, rain-drenched morning and seeing that primeval country for the first time was wrenching and enthralling. The highway itself, for stretches of miles at a time, was one long arboreal tunnel. At times the trees would fall away on one side or the other as the highway took an unexpected turn, and a broad green vista would open up of a white coursing river among alders, the far-off white-capped Olympic mountains, or a broad exposed slope of slash- and stump-ridden carnage. I remember being speechless and transfixed as the adreniline coursed through my veins. The one most memorable moment came when the highway swung westward and we found ourselves speeding right along the coast. I had a glimpse of one especially beautiful stretch of ocean that I later learned was Ruby Beach, and I vowed to return to it as soon as I was settled and had lined up a job.
Forks, Washington
Not long after my glimpse of the sea, after another thirty miles or so of mostly deep forest, the country began to open up, and I found myself riding over a broad green plain with hills in the distance, nearly all of which had been wholly or partly shaved clear of trees, leaving wide exposed tracts of nothing but tangled debris and stumps. In the midst of this worked-over landscape sat the grubby little town of Forks, Washington, population about 1700. I would soon learn that it refered to itself as the ‘logging capital of the world’ and the ‘steelhead capital of world’, claims which were in fact fully justified. It was a strictly utilitarian sort of place, with no large trees left anywhere, no buildings of architectural note, and scarcely any cars. Instead the most significant presence in the town was its swarming numbers of great gleaming logtrucks, attended, as it were, by swarms of pickups. The logtrucks were everywhere and were simply overpowering: Peterbilts, Macks and Kenworths, mostly loaded with logs and some of the logs so big that the biggest trucks could only carry a single log. It hit me immediately that I had landed in a bonafide western boom town, brimming with swagger, adrenilin and money to be made.
I felt a little like one of those small early mammals in the age of the dinosaurs and my first instinct was to stay out of the way and be as inconspicuous as possible. I was still basically a shy, insecure kid, who had never caught on to the art of machismo. I was certainly no brawler. On the other hand, I had always felt at home in the woods (though these were much bigger woods than I had seen before) and for the past three years I had worked for a city forestry department and a large park district as a tree trimmer and feller. I was at ease handling the biggest chainsaws and had felled and bucked up trees as large as any that grew in the midwest. But there was the rub. In Illinois a large tree was maybe 75 feet high; out here they were three or four times as high. Except for the sequoia and redwoods of northern California, the largest remaining trees anywhere on the planet were right here on the Olympic Peninsula. Still a novice by bush league standards, I had by some fluke managed to stumble into the Majors, into the Show. Deep in my gut I had the cold sinking certainty that I’d be lucky to last a month.
I join a camp of itinerants
In any case, I had no intention of joining a logging crew anytime soon, not until I’d been around awhile and could had a clearer idea of what I was getting into. I had heard there were mill jobs for the taking and that seemed an easier place to start. I had a couple of old friends, one of them my cousin, who had come out here in the summer and had written me about the abundance of jobs. They didn’t know I had made the decision to come. 
I knew they were camping somewhere northeast of Forks in a camp-ground along the Calawah River. Finding them wasn’t difficult. I picked up the river north of Forks and started walking the logging road that ran alongside it. I had gone a couple of miles when an came down the road, going my way. I stuck out my thumb and it pulled over. I climbed in back and found myself sitting across from another hitchhiker, a tall, rail-thin gentleman with black shoulder-length hair, long beard and wearing a tophat. He was carrying a long object in a leather case, either a fishing-rod or a rifle (it turned out to be a rifle). We talked briefly and discovered we were headed to the same camp. But I was paying less attention to our conversation than I was to the clean, clear frothing Calawah at the bottom of the ravine below us, churning its way to the sea. Even though it was maybe fifty feet below us, we could feel and inhale the cold fresh air that rose from its rapids.
The camp turned out to be six of seven young men like myself living in a large makeshift tent, almost the size of a small house, built of heavy gauge clear plastic wrapped around a frame of saplings. Inside I found my cousin, Mitchell Young, also with shoulder-length hair and long beard, sitting by a small woodstove frying a venison steak. A couple of years before he had been a Marine sergeant in Vietnam; now he was settling into an easy-going life in the north woods. He was surprised to see me. My other friend, John McDougall, whom I had known since junior high, when he arrived in camp from an errand in town, was also suprised. We were going to write you and tell you not to come, he said. When I asked what he meant, he explained that, with winter coming on and the rainy season beginning, everyone was planning to hit the road. The park rangers were letting everyone stay until the end of November, at which time they were expected to dismantle the camp and move on. John was planning to head south and winter over somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona. Mitchell hadn’t decided on a plan yet, but he would end up spending a cozy winter in a trailer with a friendly woman somewhere north of Forks. Everyone else was casting around for some secure situation or another. No one was planning to winter in the woods.
A new camp deeper in the woods, along the Calawah
Once the camp was disbanded at the end of November, Mitchell, John and I hiked up the Calawah till we were well out of sight of the road and the bridge and in a picturesque spot close to the water, we built a shelter tall enough for a double-bunkbed, a woodstove made of a 55-gallon drum and a chair or two. I had found a job in a cedar mill on the outskirts of Forks where Mitchell worked. It was a small operation owned and operated by a family from West Virginia. When I spoke to the owner about work he took one look at me and asked me if I had any gloves. No, I said. Well you can’t work without gloves, he said. Be here first thing in the morning, with gloves. And that was the full interview. Didn’t ask my name or what I could do. He assumed you knew how to work in the woods and in the mill, Mitchell explained later, ‘cause that’s all anybody does out here. He just wanted to see how big you were. You’re big, so he’ll start you on deck. If you were small, he’d start you as a packer.
Working in a cedar mill
Working deck meant working with Mitchell. After the logs had been off-loaded from the truck, they were fed into the mill one at a time by means of a chain conveyor which hooked the logs from underneath and fed them under an enormous hydrolic-operated chainsaw which cut the log into 26-inch sections. Mitchell operated the conveyor and the saw. In addition to the lever which lifted the saw above the log, he had two buttons: one to inch the log forward under the saw, and the other to start the saw.
Once the saw had cut through the log, the 26 inch thick section of log, a great “pie”, which could be as much as fifteen feet in diameter, slammed onto the metal deck with a crash. As soon as it hit the deck my job was to split the pie into sections called bolts, using an hydrolic splitting wedge, which I could position over the pie anywhere I wished. I needed to know enough about the nature of the wood to split it quickly apart without getting the wedge stuck. You couldn’t just sink the wedge in anywhere, or the wet wood would just swallow the wedge up and refuse to relinquish it. Then there was hell to pay. The operation would be held up and you would be forced to try and free the wedge using an axe and wedges or even a chainsaw. Getting a wedge stuck more than once or twice could get you fired. Fortunately I had spent years splitting wood with an axe and a maul and wedge and I rarely ran into a problem. Also, cedar was a good wood to split.
Mill injuries
But there were problems nonetheless. The deck was small and the ‘pies’ sometimes so large it was tricky to keep from getting your toes crushed when the pie slammed down. Once I held onto the shaft of the wedge too long when I was retracting it and my fingers got caught between the wedge and the frame, still holding onto the shaft, and my fingers were partially crushed. No broken bones, but my fingers were so mashed that the skin on the knuckles was split open and my fingers swelled up badly. That cost me a day’s work. Another time the injury was worse. On occasion a log would come through too large even for the 15-foot clearage of the saw, and it was necessary for me to shove the saw upwards even higher to allow the log to pass underneath. This involved putting my palm right on the teeth of the saw and shoving upward with all my might, as the saw was really heavy. While I was holding up the saw, and trying to keep out of the way of the log, Mitchell would hit the button that would bring the log forward. Once when we were doing this for a really huge cedar log, and I was straining to push the saw up high enough to clear the log, Mitchell went to hit the button to bring the log forward, but hit the wrong button, starting the chainsaw instead. The saw started at such a high speed it didn’t even cut my palm, but flipped my hand sharply down and cut deeply into the back of my hand, between thumb and index finger. Completely stricken, Mitchell shut off the saw and came to look at my hand. He pulled back my glove, took a look and said simply, Put it back on.
There was no hospital in Forks. The nearest hospital was sixty miles away at the end of a winding two-lane highway around Lake Crescent that was choked with logging traffic. There was, however, a notorious sawbones in town, whom no one wanted anything to do with. That’s where they took me. The nurse started by cutting off my glove and then trying to clean the wound, which was about two inches long, a quarter-inch wide and and quarter-inch deep. As much as it had bled, it was still black with sawdust and grease. The nurse was dabbing at it gingerly when old Sawbones walked in and said, Oh for chrissakes, give me that. He took the swab and dug in hard at the wound like he was scrubbing a greasy skillet. It was clean in no time. He must have given me something for pain, and a tetanus shot, but all I remember is the fast, rough manner in which he stitched me up, gave me a new glove and told me to get back to work. I was too wobbly to go back to the deck, and had somehow lost my stomach for any more wood-splitting just then, so I lied to my boss and told him the Doc had told me to take the rest of the day off.
My friends gone, I am flooded out by the rising river
Before Christmas John had split for the southwest and Mitchell had found his cozy trailer for the winter. Both had advised me to leave the woods and find a warm, dry situation before the winter settled in in earnest. Their argument was driven home on Christmas day when I returned from having Christmas dinner in Mitch’s trailer. It had rained hard all day, the river was running very high, and as I was tramping along the trail to the shelter I saw my woodstove bobbing at the edge of the river. It hadn’t quite been caught by the current and I had time to fish it out. Then I saw one of my boots floating past and grabbed it as well. When I got to the shelter I found two feet of river flowing through it. I salvaged everything I could find and moved it to higher ground.
To higher ground
Directly behind the shelter was a steep ridge about fifty feet high. I climbed it with difficulty, as it was muddy and slippery and I could only ascend it by grabbing hold of saplings pulling myself up little by little. The top of the ridge was secluded and flat and seemed an ideal place to build a new shelter. I spent the next few hours, working into the night, hauling everything up that steep incline in the rain. The worst hurdle was getting the fifty-five gallon drum up. I had to push it up ahead of me, lodging it in front of trees as I went, so it wouldn’t roll back down over me. It must have taken me an hour, and once I got it up and lay on the ground a long time in the rain, simply unable to move. I went back down, stripped the plastic off the old shelter, and then threw up a frame as fast as I could on top of the ridge and pulled the plastic over it. I built a narrow platform in the shelter, lay out my sleeping bag and crawled into it. By this time I was shivering very hard and shivered through most of the night, unable to get my body temperature up. I didn’t have the stove hooked up and in any case there was no dry wood for a fire. I had no food, which would have helped. All I could do was lie there and shake until finally I began to warm up. I had come very close to hypothermia.
By morning I was better and was able to finish the shelter, hook up the stove and, eventually, get a small fire going. After that I knew I would be ok.
At 4 a.m. each morning, a seven-mile walk to work
I worked at the mill for a few more weeks. This involved getting up at about 4 a.m., in order to make the seven-mile walk into work in time to get me to the mill by sunrise. I could usually count on Mitchell for a ride back to my shelter after work, so it wasn’t so bad. The walk in every morning, on a logging road for five miles along the Calawah, to Highway 101, was both a calming and quietly exhilirating experience, with one exception.
Encounter with a Sasquatch?
One morning, while it was still dark, when I was about two miles away from my shelter, walking down the center of the logging road, I was astonished when a large conifer tree just behind me, up on the bank by the road, began to shake violently of its own accord. There was no wind, and this really sizeable tree, perhaps thirty or forty feet high, was shaking as though some invisible Hercules or Titan had taken hold of it and was shaking it like a child’s rattle. Then the shaking stopped. And then the tree next to it started to shake in just the same manner. The hair stood right up on my neck and I started to move quickly down the road. After going some distance, I looked back I saw the shaking had stopped. So I stopped and and tried to calm myself down. Suddenly another tree close to me started shaking. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I shouted and began banging my lunch pail on the pavement. I shrieked and jumped up and down and shouted threats. Then I stopped, exhausted. The shaking started again. I took off down the road again, and again the shaking trees followed me. Aside from the shaking trees, I never saw or heard anything else. I knew it wasn’t a bear or a bull elk, as neither creature ever behaves in such a fashion – although only a very powerful bear or elk would have been strong enough to shake such large trees. I knew if either animal wanted to intimidate me they would step into the open and probably charge me. I also knew that either animal would be unlikely to be threatened by me if I were in the middle of the road. And I also knew absolutely that no man, however large and strong, could even begin to shake trees of that size. I had no idea what I was dealing with. Eventually, it left me, and I continued on to work without further incident. I never did see it.
Only later did I learn that there is only one species of animal on earth that commonly shakes bushes and trees as a means of intimidation and display, and that is, primates.
Later that year I was telling this story to a friend of mine, Chris Vollmer, who had lived for a number of years on the Peninsula, and had driven and hiked over many square miles of it. He told me of one encounter that frightened him deeply. He was driving alone late at night in a remote area in his old Dodge Powerwagon, when he came up to an intersection and saw, just outside the light of his headlamps, a very large bulky figure. It was as tall as the stop sign. Chris stopped, still some distance away, not wanting to approach any closer. He couldn’t see it clearly. It seemed to be a large, very bulky man, standing in the shadows. And then it stood up! — towering well above the stop sign, crossed the road in front of the truck, moving swiftly, and was gone. He never did see it clearly, and was certain only that it was several feet taller than the stop sign and was walking on two legs.
A last letter, papers from a lawyer
Shortly after the turn of the new year I received a letter from Vickie which said, in brief, that she had met someone else and wanted a divorce. There were actually papers from a lawyer included which I was to sign and return, along with some funds to help cover legal fees. For a time Vickie had been suggesting that I needn’t send her any more money, which didn’t make sense, so I should have suspected something was afoot. My response to her letter was to walk into Forks in the middle of the night to a telephone booth and call her. This was about a ten-mile round trip and as it happened there were near-blizzard conditions. It was like a scene out of Dr Zhivago, trudging across the snowy steppe, only there was no Julie Christie in a warm bed waiting for me at the end of the ordeal. The phonecall, of course, accomplished nothing.
Seclusion in the woods
It wasn’t long after this that I quit my job at the mill and more or less retired to my ridgetop overlooking the Calawah for an extended period of seclusion. I was emotionally and physically in a state of complete exhaustion. There was no longer any need to send money back to Illinois, and I needed very little in the way of cash myself, so with about fifty dollars, if that much, I took up the life of a hermit.
Occasionally Mitchell would check in on me, and one or two other friends, but it was usually two or three weeks at a time between visitors, and no one stayed long. Perhaps once a week or so I would walk into town for some supplies. Other than that I remained alone in my shelter for the rest of the winter. I didn’t know whether I was on National Forest land, or land belonging to a logging company — in either case I wanted to keep my presence unknown, and so refrained from burning a fire during the day, and was careful when coming down off the ridge and making my way to the logging road, that I made sure there was no one around to see me. I was especially careful to watch the river for fishermen.
Calawah River poems
By and large I spent the winter cutting firewood and reading. My favorites were Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Han Shan, Basho and the other Japanese haiku poets, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. But above all I was taken by Han Shan and his Cold Mountain poems. Han Shan was less esoteric than the haiku poets, and more humanly miserable, which I was in a position to identify with.
It wasn’t long before I began writing poems in imitation of the Cold Mountain poems, which I came to think of as my “Calawah River Poems.” Writing them was a way of dealing with my divorce and loneliness, and the privations and uncertainties of my new life. It was also my introduction to traditional forms, for previously I had only written in a sprawling free verse. Han Shan’s simple eight-line unrhymed structures were a perfect place to begin. I wrote them quickly, with little thought, often several a day. Sometimes I would fold them into planes and sail them off the ridge, or take them down to the river, fold them into boats, and set them adrift. I was toying with the idea that the act of writing was more important than the end product. Years later, after writing in more demanding forms for a long time, I recovered as many of these early exercises as I could find, and began to polish them. I also tried reconstructing from memory some of the many I had thrown away. This process of revisiting and polishing occured several times over some thirty years. I think of this process as carving rough stones little by little, until something essential emerges. Or at least that is the ideal. Too often the ‘essential’ simply isn’t there, but only the vapid and the banal.
1.In no time at all reduced to this:
penniless, jobless — the heel is out
on both of my socks and my shoes leak.
A letter yesterday from my wife
says another man now sleeps in my bed.
Last week a storm and a flood: my hut
was swept away. I peer out from under
a hemlock tree. The rain never stops.2.
I built for myself a mansion of sorts,
a lean-to of cedar and hemlock boughs,
a mattress of soft and fragrant needles
upraised from the earth to keep me dry.
On the open side I nurse a little
rock-rimmed fire, but everything leaks
and I cough all night from the cold and damp
and the rain persists till the fire dies.3.
From atop a boulder I peer straight down
at the ice-encircled clarity
of Calawah River. Its current pours
from boulders into a ten-foot pool
before frothing wildly to the sea.
Below me a steelhead lies in wait,
a shadow poised among shadows,
a glistening machete in glass.4.
Regardless of how I upbraid myself,
I do nothing but think and think of her,
of how I might possibly turn her heart –
letters or prayers or potions, what use?
Nothing will kindle cold ashes again.
I waste whole hours just lying in bed.
These long winter rains never seem to end:
firewood sodden, matches all damp.5.
A raven perched on a withered branch
appraises my paltry circumstance
sardonically, with a tilt of its head.
Begone old bird! I pick up a rock
and hurtle it hard at the raven’s head
who flies away squawking. After that,
all my sense of purpose gone for good,
I sit and count the clouds as they pass.6.
When first I made camp by the Calawah
and first cupped hands in its icy current,
I thought I had never drank of water
so sweet or so pure, but after a day
a terrible sickness gnawed at my gut
till I thought I would die . . . yet I survived.
And now I drink without harm, a drop
of deadly nightshade upon my tongue.7.
I have heard no news of the outside world
in over a month, but the world goes on
with or without me. What do I care?
We’ve our own news here: the day before last
a section of hollow log washed down
from somewhere upriver and wedged itself
between two boulders, making a dam
and a little waterfall that sings!8.
Not far from my hut, ‘neath a rocky ledge
in a little niche well out of the rain,
I have slowly built, over many days,
a cache of seasoned and bone-dry wood,
split and stacked and ready for use.
At night I dream of it: all that wood,
all that proprietory heft and bulk
crushing me into the earth like a stone.9.
There is no good way to approach this place –
a tortuous trail up a rocky slope,
a crumbling ledge on a cliff-face –
you must cling to root and sapling to keep
from tumbling into the river below,
so far below that the sound it makes,
rising through foliage-clouds and mist,
is like the breath of a sleeping girl.— more Calawah River poems to be added
as I am able to locate them among 35 years of accumulated papers . . .
During the summer of ’73, bolt-cutting on the slopes
Once the winter began to give way to Spring, my friends John and Mitchell returned to the woods, setting up a camp with some friends in an isolated spot along a tributary of the Hoh River south of Forks. One day they paid a visit and urged me to join them. After my winter of isolation, I was ready for a little society, so I packed up my things, left my shelter for some other homeless waif to make use of, and headed south. Within a day or two I had a new shelter in a alder glade, alongside a rushing stream.
During that summer I occasionally took up the occupation of a bolt-cutter. This was essentially a salvage operation, going onto logged-over slopes which were too steep to work on easily and locating big cedar logs which we could cut into 26-inch slabs and split into bolts. All that was required was a big chainsaw and an axe, though a maul and wedges were useful. The bolts had to be stacked into cords alongside a logging road where a truck from a cedar mill could stop and load it. We were paid by the cord.
The cedar logs had fallen years before. Most were from the hurricane of 1921, or a later hurricane (in the 1950s?), or from the big spruce logging operations from WWII, when they just cut the cedar to get it out of the way and left the logs where they fell. Cedar is so loaded with creosote that the logs don’t rot, even in areas like the Peninsula where it rains 120 inches a year.
Getting the logs out was the problem. They were sometimes huge, from ten to fifteen feet in diameter, so that when lying on their sides, they could still loom to twice a man’s height. To cut them at all required the biggest chainsaws available, five or six feet in length. Saws of that size were very expensive, so what the cutters I worked with tended to have were antique Homelites and McCulloughs, massively heavy and ungainly machines which were a bitch to handle — they had to be man-handled.
But first you had to get to the logs. This entailed climbing up steep, very rough ground with the six-foot chainsaw balanced on your shoulder. The slope would be such a jumble of stumps, slash and debris, and fallen logs as to be impassable. And if that meant using fallen logs, lying at crazy angles and often dangerously wobbly, as bridges over the chaos, then that is what you used, half-running up a wet, mossy incline with that big saw on your shoulder. You couldn’t pick your way cautiously — the saw was too heavy and the incline too steep — you needed speed and momentum, not only because of the weight and incline involved, but because speed added balance. It was all about nerve and finding the right rhythm. You couldn’t afford to become too careful, or it would throw that rhythm off.
The logs easy of access, on flat land or close to a road, had long since been plucked. The only ones left were on steep, rough, dangerous terrain, for from any road. They might be half-buried in mud and brush. They were often intractably lodged under a jumble of smaller logs, which would first have to be cut and hauled aside.
One of friends, Chris Vollmer, had a ’49 Dodge Powerwagon with a winch and this made log removal far easier, but there were still many cedar logs which were either beyond the reach of the cable or simply too massive to be winched out. Such logs had to be sectioned (bucked) and split into large bolts on the spot. the bolts were of such a size that even a big man could carry only one at a time, with difficulty. To move a truckload of them 30 or 60 or 100 yards across rough terrain was an ordeal. You always wanted to be above your road so that, at the least, you would not have to haul them uphill. What we often did was to heft each bolt above our heads and heave them downhill as far as we could. If we were lucky the bolts would bounce on impact and keep rolling. If we were less lucky, they would sink deeply into mud or fall down between logs and become lodged.
Bucking the log, cutting it into 26-inch sections like big slices of a gargantuan salami, was one of the most difficult tasks of the whole process. As the logs were rarely at a flat horizontal, but at some crazy angle or other, and were often more than twice as thick as the length of the saw, and as we were trying to work on a steep slope in heavy underbrush, frequently in pouring rain, finding a decent place to stand was fairly impossible. Since the blades of our saws, though 5 or 6 feet long, were som much less than the diameter of the log, we had to start a cut wherever we could, find a little purchase for our feet, cut in as far as possible, pull out, lug the saw around to the other side of the log and try to cut in precisely from the opposite side. Always the problem was finding a stable platform from which to work, high enough off the ground so that you weren’t forced to cut above your head — but generally such platforms simply didn’t exist and you had to made do and start in cutting from some awkward, difficult angle.
Many times the best option, after making a deep cut from one side or the other, was to crawl up onto the top of the log and continue the cut from there, standing or kneeling almost directly over the cut, with the blade plunged in to the hilt at your feet (or knees), as you brought it around the top of the log and down the opposite side. A final crucial consideration was exactly how the massive section of log would move once the cut was nearly through and the weight of the section was beginning to break it away. It could fall straight out away from the rest of the log, which was ideal, but it could just as easily roll sideways, either toward you or away from you, and this could pinch you saw blade and not let go of it till doomsday, or it could roll right onto you and crush you like a bug. It could, depending on how it was laying, fold back towards the log and pinch your saw even tighter than if it rolled to one side or the other. If you saw that this might happen, it was necessary to pull out your saw and start cutting from the bottom up. This was the hardest cut of all, for you had to lift the weight of the saw while it was running, and pull it up hard into the wood.
It was crazy dangerous work, made all the more so because we worked without safety gear of any kind, and often without even first aid kits. We were often 20 or 30 miles from the nearest doctor and well over an hour from the nearest hospital, which was in Port Angeles. We had no telephone or radio. If one of us had been seriously hurt, we would have had to try and haul him out of the woods over miles of winding rutted muddy logging road in a 50′s-era pickup truck. The truth was, and we all knew it, and had heard the stories — the truth was that any serious injury in the woods could easily turn fatal. If it was serious enough to call in an ambulance from 60 miles away, you would probably be dead by the time it arrived. (And it was only the logging companies who could call in ambulances; little independent crews like ourselves didn’t have that option). The wail of an ambulance in the deep woods was known as the “widow’s wail”. Injuries from axes, chainsaws or rogue logs were not forgiving.
Had any of us been older, we might have responded to these circumstances by exercising extra care, and a strict protocol of safety precautions. Instead our workdays were more often than not occasions for raucous humor and egging one another on, fuiled by generous portions of beer and marijuana. I tended to go lightly on the beer, finding that it made me groggy. Instead I preferred just the right amount of good strong “herb”, a steady powerful buzz which narrowed my focus, filled me with an uncanny energy and allowed me to settle into a powerful rhythm perfectly suited to our arduous work.
When things went reasonably well and we were able to pile up a cord or several by day’s end, it was a nearly perfect life, leaving one with a sense of power, mastery and freedom. When things didn’t go well; when there were breakdowns, bad weather, major snags or any of a thousand possible snafus, if was possible to spend a full day breaking your back and accomplishing almost nothing. Then it was truly hell on earth.
– to be continued
