Today
is another one of those days where Dad wakes me up early, before dawn. No
chance of Saturday morning cartoons or hanging out with friends. He’s had the
pickup running for ten minutes and my boots and mittens lay next to my door. I,
however, arise slowly, like Bambi just learning to walk.
I feel
my way to the coffee and slice a piece of banana
bread Mom baked the night before. It was not often that I felt that the sun of
early-morning spring Saturdays was intended to be seen rising.
After I
let the fireplace warm my backside, I turn quickly to feel the cool morning air
seep through our double-wide trailer windows mixing with the warmth of our
fireplace. I pull on my sweatshirt and my first layer of mittens and socks. My
hair is tousled and unkempt, indicative of the day we have ahead of us.
Tyrel,
who is fifteen and usually sleeps ‘til noon when Dad is away trucking, walks
slowly with his head down, eyes squinted, toward the bathroom. He flushes the
toilet a minute later and repeats my routine.
“We’ve
got five minutes,” says Dad. “Pack your lunch, and let’s go.”
He
loads his chainsaw in the bed of the truck. He checks for our goggles, gloves,
and earmuffs underneath the one long seat of his farm truck, and just as if
this morning air requires some attention rubs his hands together, looks up at
the sky, and lets out a foggy breath
into the cool, crisp mountain air.
As we
drive through Main Street, Dad’s farm truck adds to the familiar purr of
early-morning diesel engines—some of them parked alongside the Garden Café where
men get their coffee before another long day of work. Some days, Dad will join
in the local farmers’ talk of produce. But we do not stop. This particular morning,
Dad is not a Farmer.
Inside
the truck, CB radio static fills the sleepy silence, like white and fuzzy
television screens or listening to someone open a candy wrapper in church.
Truckers rattle off jokes about their women from back home. Dad does not pick
up conversation with them as I’ve seen him do before in cross-country trucking
trips. He is not a trucker today, and so we head out of town toward the
mountains.
Five
minutes down the road, Dad cracks his triangle window and lights a cigarette,
then holds his coffee cup in the same hand as he waves the two-fingered wave at
both neighbors and strangers. I tuck my head into my hood, and before long we
bound and bump along mountain roads too jagged and narrow for my father’s
truck.
Taylor’s
Fork, my father’s great discovery, is our destination, sixty miles from home
and five or more turns down gravel and dirt roads. There is a clearing, a sort of
meadow, at the base of Taylor’s Fork. It was here that Dad spent the previous
summer camping out in our $500 camper, living the life of a logger, Tyrel
as his right-hand man. On weekends, Dad and Tyrel would come home with a kettle
of greasy dishes, critter-infested clothes, growling stomachs, and an extra
truckload of firewood.
Tyrel
and I have put in enough time on this particular job to start our task the
moment Dad parks the truck. I begin scouting dead-standing trees. Don’t scout
ones with too much moss on them. No sprouts. Watch for decaying bark. Dad
surely spots them long before we do, but waits for us to identify them. He is
leading and Tyrel and I follow close behind, hurdling fallen branches and trees
and small creeks. As we pass left by a boulder, left at a half-dead tree,
right, and right again, I know that my father has memorized the route.
“Don’t
forget your path,” he says. “Remember the rule.”
Before
long we have found or first catch of the day, a dead-standing Pine.
Dad
tugs at his chainsaw at which time Tyrel and I position our goggles and
earmuffs and tighten our gloves. Our rule is to stand by him at all times and
wait for the timbering giant to fall.
Buttoned
up in a Carhart coat and an ‘Elmer Fudd’ hat, my father carefully and forcefully
carves at an angle into either side of the tree. Even as I stand alert for it,
I cannot help but see my father as one of those lumberjacks you see only in old
pictures in museums—a score of men staring stoically, yet proudly, in front of
their largest logs.
“I was
probably fourteen,” my father said once, “when a friend of Grandpa took me to
log with him. He showed it all to me.” My little brother was around the age of
seven when he first saw one timber.
Tyrel
does not watch the tree, but watches Dad, watches the way Dad operates the
chainsaw, and moves where Dad moves. My brother has even picked up the lingo so
it’s not uncommon to hear, “Yep…mhmmm…by the crick.”
When
the tree begins to sway, Dad gives it a little nudge from one side. A nudge
will never actually point it toward a different direction, but Dad likes to
show that he can control where it falls. Soon a crackling noise beyond the
protection of our earmuffs demands our attention, and we watch the watch the
four-storied tree—one-hundred or more years of growing—fall to the ground,
clearing anything beneath it.
This is
our cue to begin the next phases rolling the base logs down the trail—after Dad
slices them. Casually, our loads become lighter and so we begin to carry two or
more logs in our arms, sometimes blocking our eyesight when we do not want to
take make another round to the truck. And our reward comes each time my brother
and I creep back up the trail for another armload of wood. We hear our father’s
bellowing singing voice beyond the constant bumble of the chainsaw.
We
pretend not to notice his melody. “Then sings my soooooooul, my Savior God to
theee. How great Thou art. How great Thou art!” Soon he sings his own melody. “I
saw the light! I saw the light!...Ya ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog. Cryin’ all
the time…Oh play me some mountain music, like grandma and grandpa used to play…”
If you
look closely, you see his tapping foot and his head bouncing to a beat.
I once
heard that singing can be a reflection of a person’s joy. If that’s the case in
logging too, Dad’s the most joyful man on a mountain right now. Tyrel and I
laugh along, even though we are slightly embarrassed, and yet relieved that only
the rocks and trees and bears can hear his joy.
When
lunchtime comes, Tyrel and I tease each other and pass Dad a sandwich and try
not to laugh about the singing.
“We’ve
got a couple more trees to do,” he says. “Let’s get to it,” and we start our
routine again: earmuffs, nudge, roll the bases, armloads, medley, embarrassment.
We work
away the hours at Taylor’s Fork, clearing out dead-standing trees one at a
time. Sometimes when Dad is not looking I pull both my thumbs and indexes
together to make a frame. I pretend to capture moments in pictures of his
on-the-side occupation. I pretend that Dad is standing in front of
dead-standing trees and logs rolled into a pile as he is posing for a picture
that will one day hang in a museum, where lost arts often go.
I’ll
add our logging pictures to those which I’ve labeled Dad: early Saturdays
weeding our massive gardens; early Saturdays fishing at the lake; early
Saturdays feeding pigs on the farm; early Saturdays delivering loads of lumber
from Butte, Montana; early Saturdays painting, raking,
building, mowing, camping, boating.
Tomorrow
we’ll let Dad have his Sunday dinner reminisces, bringing my family back to
places like this and times like this when work like this could keep any family
on their feet for more than a cold winter.
