Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Feb 26




The rain falls sideways and freezing my face and hands while above me the red oaks slash through the air. Nervous that I will get hit by a widowmaker, I fiddle through my key ring looking for the one that will get this gate open and me through it and on inside the shop where I have a bag of spoke shavings and plenty of dry wood saved for just such a day. Seamus is home from school sick with a stomach bug and wife is watching him while I work the morning shift. At lunch I’ll relieve her so she can go teach.   

I open the shop going directly to the stove and build a Lincoln log pyre and stuff the base with shavings. Just as I light the fuel and feel the first warmth I hear the clatter of sheet metal. This is not unusual, but this particular crash stretches, screams, and whines like a building is coming down.
I go to the window but can’t see anything through all of the rain.

I load scraps onto the fire as it is now well burning, put on my parka, and go outside to see if the out buildings still stand, The cold and the rain hit me all over again as I make my way around the building tiptoeing around puddles too large to not get soaked if I step in them. All looks fine,  but as I turn to go something catches my eye and I stop and do a doubletake of the sawmill. The lower half of the roof is missing. I hadn’t noticed it before as the roof pitches away from me, but now I had just the right angle, and yes, it was clearly missing.

I have things to do, I think. And this isn’t one of them. Not today. Not in this rain. I’m not even sure where the missing corrugated metal has blown off to. I can’t see it anywhere. 

A muddy reservoir forms below, but I make it through alright. One of my sheets has rolled clear across the yard and is pinned against a lumber stack. The other blew the other way, over the barbed wire fence and against a set of storage buildings my landlord rents out. I am able to make my way over the fence and move the sheet metal through a space between a set of gates. I secure the corrugated sheet metal by placing several 8x8 stringers on top of it. I look at the exposed sawmill and tools and wonder if I shouldn't do the roof repairs now.
 
But there is an old saying from the hills that fill my head.

Only a fool would fix a roof in such a rain. And when it ain’t rainin the roof won’t leak. 

I let this wisdom play about me while imagining the warm fire inside. I head to the shop thinking myself pretty smart considering my feet are defacto wet even though I never did manage to step in a puddle. A fire will do me just fine I think. I return to the stove inside and find that even in my short absence the fire has long since burnt out.

Feb 5-6





I’ll get outside to work as we have a couple beautiful days coming up. It seems too early for spring, but the hibiscus are already blooming. Warm days mean hurley orders. Somewhere along this belt of warmth a customer is wishing they had a replacement hurley for the one they broke in the fall, or maybe a new sliotar as a dog chewed through the old one.

I shed my fleece as I clean up bark and wood scraps that lay about the yard—I’ll burn them in the fire when the temperature does drop.  I split wood, setting up three or four rounds and swinging away ta them in turn in one long anaerobic exercise.

I empty the kiln and smell quite a stench so I make my way around the kiln and see nothing save the water barrel. A furry thing is floating on the top. Dusty I think. Old dusty the lost cat has finally turned up. I roll the barrel over and to my surprise not Dusty, but five dead squirrels spill into the mud. I gather them up in a box and dump the, outside the gate for the coyotes.
I work on a few tables I’m nibbling away at. Shave a couple dozen hurleys and then stop work early to pick up the boys from school.  
The next day I check on the squirrels and they are gone. Circle of life.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Mountain Logging (Part 2)



The people living in the hollows are the descendants of pioneers, and everywhere are signs of their ancestors. Walls built of stone from the fields, grave plots, grist stones, plows, ruins of river rock foundations. They fought and drove out the Indians cut the forest, cleared the fields of stones, and built something they thought would be passed down, thinking the land would be cared for as they themselves cared for it. 

Every plot is a contrast between what was built well versus what was built cheaply. The hand-split locust posts and the metal ones. The wooden shack and the tin carport. The old ford tractor and the newer Chinese one. And there are contrasts as to how the land is used or not used. It is common to see cattle farms without any cattle. Chicken coops without chickens. Pig pens without pigs. Dogs dominate properties, prowling the yard, or racing my truck across their span of territory.
Factories brought people out of the hills, but now the factories are gone. There is logging. There is coal. There are still some jobs at manufacturing plants if you can run a CNC machine. There are road construction jobs, but many of the men are out of work while their wives have taken the health services jobs that have sprung up around the county. Every logger that I work with has a wife who works in health services.

There are drugs to fill the malaise. An ambulance driver on whose property we logged told me that sixty percent of their calls were for overdoses or people freaking out on meth or bath salts. He said bath salts are the more popular at the moment.  In their state of unreality, the user calls the ambulance, and when the sheriff show up along with the ambulance, the user bars the door. Then the sheriff has to try to talk his way into the house while the medical crew waits…and meanwhile, Uncle Danny has a heart attack ob the other side of the ridge and can’t get an ambulance and dies.
I turn up Cave Road, a single lane ice and snow covered trail that runs up along a creek towards a hollow tucked just under Clinch Mountain. I logged this patch before Christmas—pulled fifteen butts out that time. It is north facing and so lays in the shadows of the hills. The road winds through little homesteads, often splitting them in two as the land between the hills gets tighter. The shadowy snow covered road continues past one more white-washed Baptist church and then recklessly towards the steep face of Clinch.

The land adjacent to the logging site belongs to a rich man with ten foot wrought Iron gates with his initials BHLwritten in gold lettering. A cleared asphalt drive winds its way over the hill. He has built a ten foot fence around his perimeter, some 10 miles to keep his prize within and the locals out. His prize: a herd of western elk.  They say he lives out of state and hardly ever visits.

The approach to the logging site is a half a mile along a decent dirt road—at least it’s decent today. The logging site can’t be seen from Cave Road, but everywhere are the tracks of mud left by the logging trucks. The approach road changes with the weather conditions and the traffic of logging trucks that come through. This crew can move nine loads on a good day so as the road is broken down it has to be rebuilt, usually daily. On bad days the road will have one foot ruts carved out by the logging trucks. On those days I try to drive parallel to the ruts hoping that my truck won’t bottom out.  
But the road today is good—it had been dozed before the snow storms and it is frozen and flat like frozen tundra. I use the four wheel drive and hope a logging truck isn’t coming from the other direction. When it does, one of us has to back their load the other direction, which is a disaster when the road is in bad shape.

On one side of the hollow, under the view of Clinch, stands a pristine snow covered forest, resplendent in ash, poplar, and oak that combine to create a symmetry of trunks and tops rising to the heavens. On the other side is clear cut devastation. The snow has fallen here too, but it does nothing to hide the fact that the hillside is dead. The earth here is turned over, loose and eroding. It is littered with tops and broken bows that twist and turn into the chaos. Hardly a sapling is spared.

The road up to the site is easy going and I don’t run into any problems. I back the trailer into the edge of the truck turnaround where the loggers park their trucks. One of dozers is on the left side of the ridge working with Jim and the skidder is making runs between the buck saw and the dozer.                    
The other dozer is parked just in front of me. Jumper cables run from the battery and fall lifelessly into the snow, and on the other side somebody has pulled a hydraulic line. Three years ago when I started with this crew the dozers were new and yellow. But three years working for a high volume crew has left them battered, sides dented in, cages beaten, paint dulled or missing.  

It can be hard to find a logger who is working consistently. Many smaller outfits do grading work or deliver gravel. Some do tree work. A small logger will try to keep a patch of timber for the days he is between work. On the phone a stalling logger says they are waiting for the patch to dry out. And by the time it does dry out it usually rains. “This weather’s been something else. Washed out my road. We’ll get back in there when it dries some. Call again.”

But the Stack outfit always works. It is why I work with them. Other crews stop when the weather is too cold or even if it is too hot. This crew works. If they don’t work they don’t get paid, and then the bossman can’t pay the note on the skidders and the dozers.

I am pulling on my boots and chaps when the skidder pulls up and out jumps Jonny.  Jonny is back! I had heard he had been fired stealing the seat off an old plough. Didn’t recognize Jonny at first, He dressed in winter olive green coveralls and wore an army surplus helmet liner, like a tank driver.  He is tall and tan, wears a black mustache and is lean and fit for 55. He is someone I really trust out there. I know if the crew takes off early and I’m working on the other side of the ridge that Jonny will come find me. He knows I’m trying to get home to my family. He’ll skid my butts out and run the knuckle boom to help me load the trailer and then drive out after me to make sure I get on the road alright. If I am working the next day as well he brings me a coffee and a sausage biscuit. At lunch he whittles with a small folding knife. He isn’t really making anything. Just whittles the stick down to nothing and then finds another to work through. He likes whittling the different species, examining what he sees inside, comparing them like an anatomist.

“You sure know how to pic the days don’t ya?” he laughs.

“I log when wife tells me I can log.” We smile and I shake his hand.  “I’m glad you’re back Jonny.”

“Me too. You don’t realize how good a job is until its gone.” He looks down at the ground and shuffles his feet. After another minute he finally looks at me and asks if I need I ride up to the other boys. No I say, I’m headed to the right side of the ridge to go after some of the ash we left in the woods. “It’s good to see you Jonny,” I say. “I’m really glad you’re back on.”

He sets off the other way in the skidder and I gear up. I wear an orange North Face jacket. I always do if it is cold enough. It is quite a contrast with the Carhart ones everyone else wears, but I have another reason for wearing it. I'm trying to not get shot. Sometimes I will go to a site before it is logged to scout out the ash. Sometimes I am the first there, or sometimes there is a dozer and cutter building roads and a staging area for the buck saw and logs. I’ll hike up in the boundaries of the land always a little worried about getting shot. It is unnerving walking under hunters stands. I have seen hunters on adjacent boundaries, and even had a landowner take a shot just over my shoulder while I was clearing out the dirt around an ash tree. When I cut I wear an orange logging helmet and chaps. I wear gloves as I am often adjusting hot saws and stringing winch cables around trees. I’ve had stray twines winch cables puncture my hands enough to know better.


I am cold. Have to go out cold knowing you’ll warm up when you get working. If you don’t start out a little bit cold you probably aren’t doing it right.  There are deer foraging in the fields between the side of devastation and the side that is untouched. They are no longer scared of the dozers and the chainsaws. 

I often get a ride up the hill on the side of a dozer or on the side of the skidder, the wheels churning below my feet. But today I am hunting butts that were left in the devastation. Butts that I had to leave behind a month earlier when I hauled out fifteen from these woods—when they were still woods. I head up the hollow. I have a can of gas and a can of bar oil through the handle of my mattock, the handle end in my armpit, my hand supporting the middle. I carry my saw on my shoulder--they say you should never do this as you could slip and the teeth could cut your carotid artery and you would bleed to death. I have heard of loggers dying this way. Today it doesn’t matter though as I am wearing a thick collar. On  hot days I try not to carry it this way, but sometimes, if I am alone and tired I’ll do it, ever aware of the risk that I am taking.

The hill is steep, and I make measured steps and settle into a rhythm up the side. My heart rate is up, I’m warmer, and I’m climbing at a good clip. I find a good place to leave my gas and oil, somewhere central to the work that I am doing. The timber cutter and dozer have left me butts that I marked with an orange Q. I chop at the snow and mud from around the tines and cut them out. My chain goes quickly, and it is so cold I can’t file the blade back sharp. Can’t see the filings because it is so cold they are clogging up in the file. Everywhere is devastation. Tree root balls dozed out of the way. Tops of the trees scattered across the hillside. Though unsightly, it’s good to leave the tops in the woods as it helps with erosion control.  On the far side of the ridge the roads are so steep and iced over that the skidder can’t get up there. I can see the dozer driver rebuilding them—it will work for a while. Then the skidder will drag out a few more loads and destroy the road enough that it’ll have to be rebuilt again.

I remove four butts before lunch. I try to cut out the butts and roll them to where the dozer can get them in all this debris. This isn’t the best way to do logging. I always want to be in on the front end of a cut because the back end, like today, is a disaster zone.

I come back down and everyone is gone. Hopefully they are just getting lunch and will be coming back, or it’ll be a cold night in the truck. I eat my sandwich in the truck looking out at the deserted site. I have the engine running and the heat on my toes which are numb. With everyone gone the birds have come out. Cardinals chase each other along with nameless other birds I won’t pretend to know. I finish my lunch and they still aren’t back yet. With nothing better to do I head back up the ridge searching for more butts.

I working steadily and don’t see them until a dozer comes by me on the hillside. Jim the Timber cutter is standing on the winch of the dozer and Terry is driving.  I finish a few more butts and then meet them where they are working a little further along. Jim drops a couple more ash for me and I cut them out and we push them off the hillside to the dozer down below.

“There’s a nice ash up on a shelf up there. Nice size for you. I’ll cut it for you if you want. You can roll it down when you’ve cut it out.”

“It’s up there though,” I say. We are on the steepest part of the snow covered ridge and the idea of climbing it with a saw and mattock is daunting. It would be hard on a good day, but in these conditions it is dangerous. The trees up there are best approached from the topside, not from below. A road will have to be built up along a hollow.

With no other ash left on the ridge, I leave my saw and go up to take a look. The hillside is so slick I have to use my pick to climb up there. Not only that, I have to climb over several rock outcrops. I’m not sure I’ll even get my saw up here if I wanted to. It is four o’clock, time for the boys to quit and this would be one more thing for Jim and his dozer driver to do. It is a majestic towering tree standing just above the devastation below. It too will be sacrificed. The tines on the ash run square on all four sides and are even in height as the tree grows on a nice flat shelf. I lean on it and look out at the rocky face of high Clinch and the pristine wooded ridge below it and opposite the devastated one on which I stand. The hum of the diesel engines run far below me and in the air I can smell the distinct odor of the ash tree on which I lean. I can always smell the ash. It is inside me.   

Though the butt looks good and Jim offered to cut it I would be pressing my luck. Here is why. People ask me how I get ash. I get ash because I have built relationships over years. I know enough about a logging site—proved that I can keep up with the cutters, drop trees when I have to, not slow the operation down, get out of the way, and not get killed.  I have worked hard to get this trust and I work hard to maintain it. Though it would make a good set of hurleys, that’s why I leave that ash on the hillside. I am cold and tired. The cold has snapped the strength out of me and I am ready to be finished. I take in one more smell of this champion ash and carefully descend the hill.

Jonny loads the seven butts with the knuckle boom and I think about going back up and taking some pictures of Clinch, but Jonny is in his truck now waiting for me to leave. All the others have gone. No goodbyes. Only Jonny waits. I can tell he wants to make sure I can get onto the road below, so I drive out and he follows me. I am grateful for an ally here. It has been hard earned.


Monday, February 4, 2013

Mountain Logging (Part 1)


January 15
Winter is the logging time. In winter, the sap is down in the ash trees, which makes for the best hurleys.

Ash on the Carolina Piedmont, where I live, is too brittle for hurleys. I’ve logged the piedmont between Greenville and Winston Salem, but the soil runs red with clay and makes for light, brittle wood—like balsa. Even in the loamy sections along the streams, the wood cuts too easily with the chainsaw.

Ash is not dominant here, growing in patches along streams and in bottoms. The bottom ash butt swells round, what we call pumpkin ash in Indiana, making the grain grow in quilted patterns that are useless for hurleys.

In the north, ash are more abundant being the first growth trees along fences and in overgrown orchards and pastures. 

I drive north, sometimes leaving the night before and sleeping in the truck cab on a nice gravel spot along the side of a county road. Wife is used to such exploits. She has stopped asking too many questions. No matter the weather or the job, wife always blocks out two days for me to go on a log run. If I am home in one it is a bonus—at least for me.

But today it is five in the morning and the alarm goes off. Wife tells me that it is time to make the doughnuts. I roll out of bed and put on my woolen socks, work pants, and a fleece, and then kiss wife. As I descend the stairs and then proceed through the halls, I try to be quiet and not wake the whole house, but my feet are heavy and the old #2 oak flooring squeaky.  I make coffee and warm bread in the toaster and look out the window imagining what the day will hold. Outside the street and houses are black. I check the thermometer and it reads twenty degrees. It will be cold up on the mountain.

I gather my breakfast and head out the door to the truck, and just then the chill hits me and rolls through the back of my head. My truck and trailer are hitched up and waiting at the curb. I turn the key and the truck thunders to life, filling my chest with the rubble and bass of the vanity muffler the last owner installed.

I load my logging boots—they are too muddy to wear. I have my mattock and straps. I have a good saw, gas, chains, and plenty of files. I have a sandwich for lunch, enough canned food for two days, water, my wrench box, a persuader bar, two spare bottle jacks, straps, spare tires, a sleeping bag and a change of clothes. I get in the car praying that I will be back with a full load, without a load or with a small load everything is wrong, nature is against me, man is against me, as is God. On those days I’m ready to quit this craft.   

I buy cheap South Carolina gas and then begin my climb north across the Eastern Continental Divide and into Asheville. I try to get past Asheville before daylight, before the morning traffic. If I’m lucky wife will call me and put the kids on and they’ll all wish me a good day in the mountains, but I don’t hear from them this morning. I move north of Ashville, hauling the 2,000 pound trailer up and down snowy 6% grades towards  Sam’s Gap and into Tennessee and the Cumberland Plateau. The view descending into a high valley is like a long shot in cinema—the interstate lays itself out before me in all of its engineering majesty, and I see the lights of cars and semi trucks frozen in the great distance. These old mountains ridges roll at their peaks, beat away over the millennia. They are black, and the sky is a hazy grey, and in between is a buffer stamped with tulip poplar tops— the poplar blending the two colors together through millions of streams of branches. Mount Mitchell and the Blue Ridge Parkway are just east of here, and I am reminded of camping a mile in the sky on the side of Mt. Mitchell in a storm, the wind hounding the tent with 50 mile an hour gusts, my two boys pressed violently against me, wishing they were at home with wife.

The truck creeps up the grade at 4,000 rpms—the base of the muffler fills my chest. Here the road is washed white with salt and all along the edges  is the plowed snow. The snow grows deeper as I approach the top and the color of the day now changes rapidly as light floods the sky. At 3760 feet I cross the pass at Sam’s Gap and the morning sun welcomes me into Tennessee—the land of my ash. I shift the truck out of gear and let it plunge down the other side of the mountain. The truck and trailer take great sweeping turns through road cuts covered with a thousand frozen waterfalls. When the speed gets too high I throw the truck into gear and the control comes back. There are times when I slow it in second gear, but for the most part I know every bank and turn on the road and use my inertia for the next quarter hour, a controlled fall into the valley below. The sky fills with belts of rosy pinks, blues, and purples as we descend along Higgins Creek.  The land is more populated as we approach the valley, and in and around the settlements of Clear Branch and South Indian Creek, chimney smoke puffs from little sawmill houses with fresh pine siding and either red or green tin roofs. Along the creek sycamore and locust trees are second only to the ubiquitous poplar. The dirt here is black and fertile, good land for hay farming and raising cattle, but much too rough for farming.

As I head west out if Kingsport, I am flanked by the Clinch Mountain which runs one hundred and fifty miles in length with only two natural gaps. I turn north into the mountain running along circuitous little roads that pass little two story farmhouses built much too close to the road. The slightest mistake and I’d drive the truck into a ditch or into the barbed wire that runs along the road keeping the cattle in the fields.  White washed Missionary Baptist churches rise up from the creek banks while stone steps descend into the water that washes away sin.

The old homesteads sit with an earned dignity though weathered grey, boarded up, with sagging porches and junk strewn about the yard. Just behind them is a nineteen seventies mobile home—once a smart alternative to the old farmhouse—now dented, missing siding, and black with mildew also with junk strewn about the yard. Regardless of their tidiness or lack thereof, every plot with a living inhabitant has a satellite dish—a sort of flag to let the neighbors and passers by know—we are still here.