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.