Denny started from the bottom and worked his way up the hill. He was thinning, spacing trees eighteen feet apart. Each one would fall with a whoosh and crash down into the forest floor, shaking the Earth. Using his gas-powered saw, he swept the hill, eventually coming to two hemlock trees. The bar and chain ate through the wood with ease, and when he finished, he waited. The hemlocks groaned but never fell. They were caught up in the tangled mass of branches from a hooter tree, standing with branches growing out sideways like a spider’s web, catching nearby trees. Loggers called these widow makers. Denny put down the saw and went up to the hemlocks stuck in the hooter tree’s web. He pushed and pulled at the trunks, but the trees didn’t budge. Straining his whole body, he tried twisting and rotating the hemlocks, but they stayed stubborn in the web. Wasting time with the rest of the hill to thin, and confident those trees weren’t going to move, he took ribbons and marked the two hemlocks for the skidder operator to find.
He picked up his saw, gas, and oil, and continued up the hill. At the top he took a minute to catch his breath and surveyed the hill, taking in the sea of evergreen. As he looked down, he spotted something he missed; an old alder tree needing to be cut. He picked his way back down the hill to the alder, not far from the hooter tree. He turned on his saw on and cut down the alder without much of a strain. Whoosh! He watched it fall easily. Satisfied with his work, he picked up his gear and began walking. But suddenly, there was another. WHOOSH! He glanced up. Ten feet above his head were those hemlocks falling toward him. For a split-second Denny thought about jumping out of the way. They were eight feet above. If he did jump, he’d be broken in half. Six feet. He dropped his gear. Five feet. Denny turned sideways and felt the wind rustle his hair as each hemlock crashed down. He stood frozen and untouched. A hemlock two feet on either side of him. Once he was able to move, he grabbed his stuff and went back down the hill to the landing. When the loading operator gave him a look, Denny said simply, “I’m going home. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I should be dead.” He came back the next day.
OSHA describes logging as the most dangerous job in America. Death and danger are a normal part of logging- falling and sliding trees that could crush a person in an instant. Dangerous tools and equipment such as chainsaws, heavy wires, and machinery, are used every day. Only those who are insane would take such a job like that. When I was interviewing my grandpa, Denny, he told me a couple of his many near death stories while logging. When I asked why he would continue to work in logging after a near death experience, he just replied, “Yeah a lotta people killed out in the woods,” and went on-
Denny’s power saw roared as he felled a couple of big alder trees across a dry creek. They slammed down against the earth like the fists of angry children. Leaves and loose branches from the fallen trees fell fifteen feet into the rocky creek bed below. He saw that the felled alders had many thick branches sticking out like arms. Not wanting the skidder operator to drag them in with all the limbs on, he stepped onto the alder trunk and walked across. Fifteen feet above the rocky bed, he started delimbing the trunk, but as he was doing so, the bar of his saw hit the trunk of the tree. The trunk was timber bound and snapped in half, launching Denny into the air. As he came down through the broken alder, falling towards the rocky bed, he instinctively hooked a close limb with his arm. It spun him around so now he laid horizontal looking up into the sky. He fell, hitting his back and head against the rocks. Luckily, he was wearing a motorcycle helmet, which knocked him unconscious instead of splitting his head open. Sometime later, he awoke to find his power saw between his legs, still running, and the back of his helmet with a large dent, as if it had been kicked in. Denny turned off the power saw, stood up, and shook the pain and adrenaline off. He shut down the crew and they all went home for the day.
The next morning Denny woke up with a sore back and a sprained wrist. But he still got up and began to put on his clothes. “Where’re you going?”, his wife asks.
“I’m going to work.”
“Take a look in the mirror.”
Denny turned around. His entire backside, from his shoulder blades to the back of his knees, was purple. The blood had pooled on his back as he laid unconscious in the back of the creek bed. Then he taped up his wrist, put on his coveralls, and went to work for the day.
Sometimes I would get lost in my grandpa’s storytelling, as he would just casually move onto another story of near death. I couldn’t fathom nearly getting crushed by two giant trees or falling fifteen feet with my chainsaw still on, and then going to work the next morning like it was just another day. Those types of experiences didn’t seem normal to me. He went into another story about a time he felled a tree, and it slid down a log, shooting at him like an arrow. It would’ve gone through him if it hadn’t gotten snagged on a branch. He finished with a “I should’ve been dead. There’s no two ways about it. I should’ve been dead.” I asked if that ever made him want to quit and, to my surprise, he replied, “No, I loved it out in the woods. You gotta realize my whole family had been loggers since the 1800s.” My great, great granddad, only 19, came to Winlock Washington in 1899 from Houlton, Maine, to run the logging railroad and the western logging camp. His first cousin owned the railroad, the logging camp, and the two biggest sawmills in Winlock. My great grandpa was a logger his whole life until he was 52, when he became a sawmill owner and operator. And finally, my grandpa carried on the tradition by starting his own logging company in college. With a crew of five guys, four Vietnam War veterans, and his younger brother, they worked in the forest and traded war stories. My grandpa only stopped logging when the Weyerhaeuser logging company started shutting down his logging contracts. Times were changing and government policies and regulations on logging were getting stricter. He stopped because he had to, not because he wanted to.
