If I’d Only Known

     Back in 1974 I went to work in the woods for the now defunct Brown Company of Berlin, New Hampshire. The outfit owned 650,000 acres of woodlands and had first rights to cut on another 200,000. It was a big time paper company.

The feller-buncher would
harvest trees as large as
18 inches and would cut
two stems a minute all day

      You worked hard in the woods. We were loggers, but never called lumberjacks. That was a Hollywood made-up name or something, too sissy-sounding. There weren’t many young men in the woods then, mostly ”old guys” in their fifties and sixties. Younger men preferred something easier and maybe not so dangerous. And everyone spoke French, except for me.

      It was the end of an era. We operated out of a camp where men stayed Monday into Friday. A cook prepared meals. Those men worked hard and could cut wood like nobody I had ever seen. Danger added a little spice to the job. Looking at your wood pile you could tell how big your paycheck might be.

      I left that job to run the first mechanical tree harvester in New Hampshire, and soon ran the entire whole-tree harvesting operation. The days of men with chainsaws and logging camps were numbered.

      If I had only known I would have taken a million pictures.

      Growing up my family owned property on Cape Cod on a bay a half mile across. You couldn’t see any other cottages, it was wilderness. Electricity was miles up the road. As my father used to say, “You could go skinny dipping at noontime”.

One of our cottages sat so close to the water
a small marine railway could haul the boats inside
the basement. This picture was taken from the dock.

      Rabbits, ruffed grouse, and bobwhite quail lived in the woods. And of course ducks showed up by the thousands every fall. We traipsed through the woods with shotguns in hand or hid in the marshes. There’s no place left like that on Cape Cod now.

      If I had only know I would have taken a million pictures.

      Sixty years ago was a time when you just did things, asking permission or filing for permits never entered one’s mind. If there was something you didn’t know how to do you either tried to find something about it in a book or you just figured it out. Those how-to YouTube clips are handy, but they do nothing to exercise your brain. Henry Ford said there is no greater joy than solving problems. He was right.

      My wife and I are fortunate to live where things aren’t all that different from the way they were fifty years ago. Nobody bothers you if you don’t bother them. There’s very few things you need to ask permission about. We still march all over the country looking for ruffed grouse and woodcock. There are streams you can fish all day without seeing another angler. Our dogs are seldom on a leash.

      You know I’m going to take a bunch of pictures.

When is it Wild?

Every part of the country I hunt has been trampled at some point. Heck, the Native Americans arrived there right after the ice receded about eleven or twelve thousand years ago. The Europeans traipsed through there trapping and hunting three hundred or more years ago, then came back to take the timber. And except for the rarest of patches, all of that country has been cut more than once.

A stonewall left by farmers long ago.

Farmers stopped heading north at about the latitude of where our Camp Grouse is. The winters were just too harsh and the land too bony to go further. Those that made a go of it there mostly abandoned the country years later to head west, where the stories sure made it sound better. Anything must have sounded better than all those stones. Only the toughest stayed.

The Native Americans in southern New England had established an agricultural society, clearing land and planting crops. Up where we hunt they existed only by hunting and gathering. They already knew.

But when I get miles back in the woods it still feels wild to me, even if others must have been there before. Occasionally, I’ll find an old stone wall or foundation and wonder about who had been there and what happened to them. Life must have been tough, with long miles walked to anything resembling civilization, and brutally cold winters. Talk about feeling alone.

Much of that remote county is now accessible by logging roads. Walk up into the woods though and you’ll find traces of grown in logging roads, mostly shaped by strong backs using shovels and grub hoes, back in the days when logs were twitched with horses. Some hillsides have long shallow depressions every hundred yards or so, more or less following the contours yet gently descending. They didn’t like to twitch the wood too far with horses, and on those roads the logs would be loaded onto sleighs to slide down to the frozen lakes. In the spring, when the ice melted, the wood floated down the streams to the mills.

Georgia clearing an old stone wall.

On the topographic maps you still see places marked a B Camp, Camp Felton, Camp 9 and such, all long gone logging camps. To someone who grew up enthralled with the woods of northern New England the names ring like magic. Sometimes we’ll find what’s left of one, either parts of an old cast iron stove or a rusting bedspring, all miles from nowhere.

Who were the last ones to visit? Maybe nobody had for years. Where did the wood go? What’s the nearest river? Was it logs or pulp? The records are long gone.

The history makes it interesting. The gaps in the history keep us wondering. And it’s all remote enough to be wild in my book.

One of the Last

This is about a time when I was much younger, and it was printed in the May issue of Northern Logger magazine…         

It was late September of 1974, up on a ridge south of Clear Stream and west of Errol, New Hampshire, that I first saw Joe Chasse (pronounced chassey).  The foremen, a man from Rangeley named Eddy Chivers, had driven me up the mountain in an old green school bus owned by the Brown Company to transport loggers.  Other than Eddy, I was the only one in that cold dreary bus.

Outside the windows, cuttings stretched off in every direction, and an inch of new snow frosted the ground up there high in those hills.  Most of the trees had been cut and only clusters of small unmarketable ones remained.  Skinny birch trees and young poplars glowed with still clinging leaves of gold. 

Parked in front of the bus sat an old pale-green Chevy pickup with a plywood camper on its back that had been painted to match.  Eddy babbled on in an accent grown between Maine and French Canada about this guy called Batman that I was about to meet.  All of it overwhelmed a young pup like myself who had grown up the suburbs of Boston, but I did my best to take it in.  I do remember Eddy saying that this guy was called Batman because he drove his skidder like the Batmobile.

The door of that faded Chevy opened and a stout man climbed out to stretch.  He didn’t stand very tall, but I remember him as being about as wide as he was high, with broad shoulders and enormous hands.  A prominent chin with thick lips protruded from his large head, and big bulging insect-like eyes looked back at us.  A tattered beige knit hat was pulled down over his ears.

With a stride that rocked him side to side and those round eyes darting about, he sauntered to the back of his truck and opened the camper’s door.  After pulling out a pair of heavy gray wool pants, he tugged them on over the thick wool pants that he already wore.  It made him look even wider.

I don’t recall much about the actual face-to-face meeting or who explained what I was supposed to do.  It was the last day to work that cutting though, and all that remained to be done there was cut down some small softwood trees and turn them into four-foot pulp.  As I made the back-cut on a lone fir and tried to push it over, Joe dropped down off of his big yellow skidder and came over to help.  Together we pushed and made the tree to fall in the right direction.  I’ll always remember what he said, “Aye, sometimes two mens are more den twice as better than one.” 

Our next yard was on the side of Cambridge Black Mountain, many miles up in the woods, in the unincorporated township of Cambridge.  The “chance”, as Joe called it, was a piece that had only been cut once before and then for only the spruce.  On the steep slope above our yard grew monstrous old rock maples, yellow and white birches, beech trees, hemlocks, white pines, spruces and firs.  With eyes swelling from excitement, Joe told me that in all the years that he worked for the company that was the best “chance” he ever had. Some of the hardwoods were so large two big men together could not wrap their arms around them.

My job was to cut up the wood after Joe twitched the limbed trees into our yard.  The company scalers wrote out for me a list of what the mills wanted for logs.  A French Canadian named Proteau was our chopper, who would cut down the trees up on the mountain, limb them, and have them ready for Joe to skid down.  Every morning when we started he would walk up into the woods without saying a word to me, or sometimes ride up on the blade of Joe’s skidder, which was dangerous and definitely against Company rules.

Because we were paid piece rate and logs were worth more than pulp, Joe was quite excited that I had this list of what the mills wanted.  He took the three sheets of white-lined paper and drove his skidder around the yard waving the instructions in his hand, yelling that now we would make some “real money”.  And because I could read and write, something that many of his co-workers could not do, Joe had me keep a log of where our wood went and mark when we were paid for it, so “the company can not steal from us”.  Company was pronounced “compan-yee”, with an accent on the end.

Almost everyday we ate lunch in that camper on the back of Joe’s truck.  He had a small propane heater and cook stove in there, and he would make himself meat, potatoes, and vegetables daily, usually accompanied with bread and something for dessert.  On cold or rainy days Proteau would come down the mountain to eat with us, seldom saying much and then only in French to Joe.

After the meal and before we went back to work, we often had a smoke.  On cold damp days, when the camper was closed up tight, it was difficult to a light match.  It would flare and then die.  Apparently the stove and heater had used up most of the oxygen.

At the end of the day, when the shadows grew long, Proteau would wander out of the woods and, with a scowl on his face, look at the woodpile to judge what I had done.  What he wanted to see was if I had caught up on the bucking of the trees that he had cut, so could I drop and limb additional trees around the yard.  As I fell into the routine, that became easier and easier to do.  But still without speaking to me, he would climb into his truck and leave.

Joe told me that Proteau had a farm up in Canada and would cut wood with us Monday through Friday, and then work the farm back home on the weekends.  He had a pile of kids there and the youngest one had a disability that brought huge medical bills, which is why money was always a serious issue.  And that worry was why Proteau drank so much.  In an attempt to apologize for Proteau’s not speaking to me, Joe told me that the man spoke no English.

Every week our pile of wood grew to enormous and the paychecks reflected it.  The company’s checks had printed on them “Not Valid over $400”, and most weeks we earned more than that, sometimes way more, so we usually received two checks.  Some of the men bragged of only giving one check to their wives and hiding the other.  One crew working near us even had three paychecks one week, something that was unheard of.

After a month or so of working together, and before he left at the end of one day, Proteau looked over the woodpile, stared me in the eye, and nodded approval.  I felt like I had made it.

On one spectacular warm fall day, we ate lunch sitting on our woodpile.  The crackle of ravens overhead echoed off the hills and a pileated woodpecker rapped on a dead yellow birch near our yard.  The few remaining leaves glowed in the warm autumn sun and overhead a lone jet left a contrail on the empty blue sky.  Joe wondered out loud where it might be going.

And then Joe said something I will never forget, “You know, some people for the city dere would pay seventy-five dollar to eat lunch like dis.”

That was so true.

One Monday, at the end of the day, Joe told me that on the previous Friday he picked up a hitchhiker on his way home after work.  While they were driving along he noticed in the right hand rear view mirror that the door of his camper swung open.  He stopped and walked back to close it, and then he noticed in the truck’s mirror the hitchhiker looking through his glove compartment.

Joe assumed the rider was looking for things to steal, so he took an axe, which he pronounced hax, from the back of the truck and walked up along the passenger side of the truck.  He said he swung the door open and held the axe over his head and shouted, “Get out of my truck or I will kill you!”

Imagining the whole event and the look on the hitchhiker’s face had me laughing hysterically.

Over time I learned that Joe grew up on a farm in Fort Kent, Maine and went to work in the woods when he was thirteen years old.  He was the seventh son of a seventh son, and supposedly had all the mystical powers that went with that, like healing people and being psychic.  There were eighteen kids in his family and when his oldest brother got married Joe said twenty-one sat down for dinner at night.

Joe had never been hurt working in the woods.  Nobody else that I knew could say that.  I’d only been there a couple of months and already had the chainsaw cut that almost seemed obligatory.  When we were working on our tools and a screw couldn’t be loosened, we’d get Joe and he would turn the screw.  If something heavy needed to me moved, we’d get Joe.  Nobody was stronger.  Once, on a dare, he picked up an empty fifty-five gallon drum with his teeth. 

           Joe confided in me that he was sixty-five years old, but that the company thought he was sixty-four, which was good because they had a forced retirement age of sixty-five.  He had no plans to stop work.  One time he told me he wanted to work for ten more years and then drive around the world.  I wondered at the time if he knew that was impossible.
          He had all his teeth, which was rare up there for someone his age, and thick silvery hair.  During the week he alone lived in a trailer next to a trucking company’s garage in town, rather than in camp where most stayed.  Story had it he fought a bit when he got to drinking, which is why he wasn’t welcome in camp.  On Fridays after work he left for home in Auburn, Maine.

Sometimes at the end of the week Joe would produce a case of beer from his camper at quitting time.  I don’t remember the brand, but it was always cans and tasted heavenly.  Proteau would take a six-pack and sit on a log and polish it off while I had one or two.  During the early weeks there was usually two conversations going on, one between Joe and Proteau and one between Joe and I, but as the weeks went by the conversations melted into one with Joe translating.

 For reasons I don’t remember I had to drive Proteau to town one day after he’d consumed a fair amount of beer.  With alcohol drowning any self-conscious inhibitions, he started to speak English.  It was the only time I ever heard him speak it and he did very well.

  Autumn slipped closer to the edge of winter and snow blanketed the ground.  Thanksgiving Day we all planned to work and then take the following three days for a long weekend, the holiday being nothing special for the Canadians.  On the way to the job as I came around the corner on the snow-covered logging road I saw five ruffed grouse in the road.  Hitting the brakes I put my Ford Bronco into a spin and slid into a snow bank, causing the vehicle to flop over on its side.

  The two chainsaws, a five-gallon gas can, two toolboxes, an axe, a pulp hook, a length of chain, and other assorted clutter made a horrible racket falling to the low side.  I stayed in the driver’s seat, even though it was on the high side and I wore no seatbelt, and looked around, holding onto the wheel tightly.  Miraculously none of the windows had broken.  Thinking that it would really be stupid to break a window at that point, I managed to carefully open the driver’s window and climb out.

   On the way in that morning I had passed a bunch of guys working on a stubborn skidder that refused to start.  I walked back down the road to where I’d seen them and they all came back to help me roll my rig onto its feet, using only muscle power.  With it sitting upright, I waited until we thought the engine oil settled back to where it belonged, and then I went off to work.

  When I arrived at the yard I told Joe why I was late.  He told me that he knew something must have happened because I had always been there.  And then we went to work like any other day.

  That yard in Cambridge was on a good gravel road, so for the winter the Company moved us to a winter road, one that is made of shaped mud and then frozen. Of course, it can only be worked in cold weather then.  It wasn’t far away, but just over the state line in the town of Upton, Maine.  Before we started cutting at that yard though we had to spend a few weeks cutting a right-of-way where another road would be shaped and frozen for the winter. 

  The spruce and fir trees in that right-of-way were tiny, not as big around as my thigh and only two or three sticks of pulpwood long.  Working long days we cut and skidded as fast as we could, but our meager pile of wood grew slowly.  The paychecks arrived on Thursdays, and first one from there was well under a hundred dollars.  Joe went on a bender and showed up at work the next day hung-over and mad. 

   Driving the skidder like a Batmobile, he drove up and down the right-of-way, breaking all the little trees up into tiny pieces.  Shouting that he didn’t care if the “Compan-yee” fired him, he wanted to be done with that chance.  I had no idea what would happen.  Proteau just shook his head and left, going back to Canada for the weekend.

  The next week the company moved us to our winter yard.

  We settled into a routine, cutting fairly sizeable amounts of wood and making decent money.  During a weekend trip back to Massachusetts to visit family, I bought a Brittany spaniel, my first bird dog. On Monday I went back to work and there wasn’t one single person that I could tell about that dog. How can you share with someone who isn’t a bird hunter the excitement of a new bird dog, particularly with the language barrier?

And then the Company offered me a better job, a chance to move into a mechanized logging operation.  It would be the way of the future they said.  Part of me wanted to stay with Joe, I knew he was the last of an era and almost every day seemed to be another story to tell.

But Joe would be forced to retire from the company, so I moved on.  A year or two after that I recognized Joe’s truck on the side of the road in Berlin, New Hampshire, across from the Northland Dairy Bar.  I pulled up behind him as he climbed out of the cab.  Recognizing me, he yelled out my name and placed a hand on each of my shoulders to toss me up in the air like a child.  We exchanged pleasantries and then parted.  That was the last time I ever saw him.

             Eventually I went on to run that mechanized tree harvesting operation for Brown Company. Someone told me once that Joe had gone to work for a jobber somewhere.  I also heard he had his first accident, a chainsaw kickback to the face.  Maybe that wasn’t true, I like to think not. 

He would be well over a hundred years old now, and I imagine he climbs on and off that skidder just a little bit slower now. In my mind, he’s just too tough to die.

           

           

             

How I fell in Love with the North Woods

Searching for some meaning, while knowing all the answers, that’s a young man right out of school.  Only in my early twenties, bound for wild places and adventures, I strode into the Brown Paper Company woods department’s office looking to a job.  When asked what I could do, I said anything and meant it.

            They sent that flatland joker from Massachusetts out to cut stump wood.  As an ignorant cocky youth I didn’t need to know what “stump wood” was, but I was sure I could do it.  They just pointed me at a stand of softwood trees and told me to fell them, cut off the limbs, cut the logs into four foot lengths, and then stack the wood neatly to be hauled out later by a bulldozer, which would snake a cable around the pile and drag the whole pile with its winch.  I remember eating lunch on the side of a beautiful trout stream and trying my damnedest find some sort of spiritual enlightenment from the hard physical labor, you know, like from Emerson or Walton or something.  But I didn’t ponder the question too long.  Not knowing how much wood piled made for a decent day’s work, I made sure I cut a lot.

The second day the boss came by and told me that I did mighty well and that starting the following week they would put me with a skidder crew, which meant I’d no longer have to move the wood by hand.  I said that sounded great and then went back to flattening the forest.  A short while later, tangled among the severed tree limbs that littered the ground to a depth of three feet, I lost my balance and my chainsaw fell against my leg.  Wet blood trickled down into my boot and I knew that wasn’t a good sign.

About two weeks later I strode into the woods department office again and told them I was raring to go back to work.  They pointed out I could hardly walk, while I insisted that I could.  Hoping that I’d go away, they said they didn’t have any work cutting trees for me.  I said I’d do anything.  They said I could go striking if I wanted to.  That cocky young guy said striking sounded good and asked where and when to report.

It turned out striking was just following the bulldozers as they pushed out skid trails up the mountains.  If anything fell on the machine’s operator I was to go for help.  With the bum leg and the hobble that I had, help would have been slow coming.  And the job paid less than the workman’s comp insurance paid while I’d been out!

A week later I was introduced to the skidder operator that I would work with, a man you would describe as stout with all capital letters.  Even though he wasn’t any taller than I, his every feature, whether hands, head, ears, feet, or lips, was oversize.

From a seat of an ancient green school bus that the company shuttled the cutters into the woods with, I watched this short broad man, dressed in heavy wool clothes, pull a second pair of pants on over the ones he already wore.  The added layer of fabric only increased his girth and ape like appearance.

He was introduced as Batman and later I was told later that he’d acquired that name for the way he drove his skidder, like a Bat Mobile.  He looked at my chainsaw and shook his head, then said something about I should have a Homelite.  My face must have questioned his statement. 

“No saw gets da tree on da ground faster den da Homelite,” he roared with boisterous conviction.  After dispensing that wisdom, he climbed up onto his enormous yellow skidder and drove off, bouncing over logs and rocks up the mountain.

Our yard sat up high on Cambridge Black Mountain in the unincorporated township of Cambridge, New Hampshire.  The piece had only been cut once before, back in the thirties, to take the spruce out we’d been told.  Enormous hardwoods with limbs bigger than most trees, hemlocks with trunks over waist high when laying on the ground, and a scattering of pines that reached for the heavens grew up there.  Batman’s eyes bulged like frog’s eyes when he saw the wood. 

“Dis is da best chance since I work for da companyee,” he said.  Company was always “com-pan-YEE”.

My job was to cut in the yard.  Proteau, who never spoke English as far as I could tell at that point, was our chopper and would fell the trees up on the mountain.  Batman’s broken English did a poor job of explaining what the trees were to be cut into, so one of the Company scalers wrote out the specs.  Batman was so excited to have someone working with him that could actually read that he took the piece of paper and drove the skidder in circles around the yard waving that paper in his hand.

We were paid piece rate, so much per cord or board foot and the three of us split the total evenly.  As the wood we’d cut was loaded to head for the mills, Batman had me start a ledger to keep track of where the wood went.  He said, “Dat way da companyee can no longer steel from us!”

Every day the large wood piled up fast.  The yellow Bat Mobile would growl as it tugged the heavy trees into the yard.  When Proteau worked far up the mountain, Batman’s trips were less frequent and I’d drop trees near the yard.  Pines came in, tapered from three-plus feet on the butt end to nothing at the top, looking like sixty or seventy-foot rat’s tails.  Gnarly old yellow birch, with their red hearts often punky of rot, were cut into pulp.  Fat rock maple, which Batman told me the mills liked best if it had no heart, just like our boss, were cut into logs.  I lopped white birch into bolt-wood lengths for the dowel mills.  The best of ash, beech, and birch went to a veneer mill.

Thanksgiving Day, headed onto the woods to work on snow packed roads, I zipped around a corner and spotted five partridges pecking at gravel in the road.  Reflexes snapped the wheel to the left and my Bronco spun around backwards and slammed against a snow bank.  The vehicle rolled onto its right side with a terrible crashing sound.

Still sitting in the driver’s seat, I waited the explosion that always happens on TV.  Nothing.  I surveyed the situation.  Two chain saws, a five gallon can of gasoline, toolboxes, tire irons and assorted other clutter are piled all over the windows on down side.  No glass was broken.  Standing on the side of the passenger’s seat, I opened the driver’s window and climbed out.

Four loggers helped roll the buggy back onto its feet and I waited a few minutes for the engine oil to find the crankcase again, then I went off to work again.  

I explained to Batman why I showed up late.  All he said was that he knew something had happened because I was never late before, and then we went to work.

Eventually I was offered a job on a mechanized tree harvesting operation and not long after promoted to run it.  It was a dream job for a young guy that loved the forests of northern New England and everywhere we cut we created great grouse habitat. 

I bought a Brittany Spaniel and he came to work with me almost every day.  Fortunately, my boss, a man named Jim Bates, loved bird hunting and bird dogs, and put up with the mud that my dog brought into the company truck.

Eventually life carried me away to other places, but my heart has always stayed up there in the north woods.