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.