Slinging Steel

from Walking Tractor

The author is going to Disneyland (see blog story The Wishing Well)

It wasn’t like I was a stranger to adventure. When I was six or seven years old, running ahead of my family down the trail from the top of Yosemite Falls, I almost got eaten by a bear. I was about the same age when, walking home from school, I got attacked by a flock of geese. When I was eight, while vacationing with my family down in Rosarito Beach in Baja, I got kicked in the nose by a horse (it just nicked me). That same summer I ran out into the street and got hit by a car. Luckily for me, the woman behind the wheel slammed on her brakes, I bounced backward off her hood and I was only slightly hurt. At least, I was only slightly hurt until my dad found out what I’d done and he laid his belt across my ass for being so heedless and irresponsible.

In the sixth grade, on a dare, I got stuck forty-foot up a fifty-foot cliff and had to be rescued by the fire department. Crazy drunk on Red Mountain wine, I totaled-out my first car when I was sixteen. During my three years in the army infantry, I experienced even more hair-raising adventures. As punishment, I ladled out a mess hall’s grease pit using a teaspoon. I did thousands of pushups and I ran hundreds of miles. I got clocked while bouncing through obstacle courses; I did forced marches, live fire exercises, extreme camping and escape and evasion drills.

In Vietnam I flew in open Huey helicopters with my feet dangling into empty space. Back in The World, I’d buckle on a parachute, get up “a big case of the ass” and jump out of a chopper, too. I also made parachute jumps out of C-119s and C-130s. Yet the biggest “blast” of all was the time I jumped out of a C-141 Starlifter, at the time the largest cargo jet in the world. When they flung open the doors on that rig and you heard the insane siren screaming of its four back-thrusting, draft horse jet engines, it was like they’d opened a portal to Hell.

So you wouldn’t think hopping aboard an old, cable-bladed D-7 Caterpillar bulldozer would have provided me with much of an adrenalin rush. And if you were thinking about nowadays, you’d be right. It’s been over thirty years since Cat tractors were allowed to go the sorts of places they used to go, or do the sorts of things they used to do, back when I first started logging. Back then a Cat could go about anyplace provided the “catskinner” (operator) was willing to cut enough trail, push enough dirt and pop enough stumps out of his way. A catskinner would punch a skid trail across the bald face of a landslide if that’s what it took to get at the logs laid out on the other side. But nowadays, for the obvious environmental reasons, once the ground starts turning steep, Cats are usually banned altogether.

But when I showed up for my first choker-setting job in May of nineteen seventy-four, it was still The Wild West. Back then you logged redwoods the way you strip-mined coal. Only two rules counted: get the product out quick and don’t get killed or mangled while doing it. The American consumer wanted redwood lumber and they wanted it cheap. And so we gave them what they wanted and we let the devil take the hindmost.

I’ll never forget my first trip up a mountain side riding that old cable-bladed bulldozer (nowadays everything is hydraulics). It was out at Spooner Creek, which runs just west of Bailey Summit out on the old Masonite Road. Spooner Canyon was deep and V-shaped and all along its bottom snaked a watered-dirt truck road just wide enough to allow two logging trucks, one empty and incoming and the other full and racing out of there, to speed past each other without clipping mirrors.

At intervals along the truck road were “landings,” which were carved, dusty flats beside, or sometimes on top of, the creek. The landings were big enough to hold between two and four “decks” of logs, that word being the fancy one for piles. Beside and behind the landings were “slash piles” sometimes as big as houses. Landings were where the logs were gathered, cleaned-up, sorted and then loaded aboard the trucks that’d take them to the lumber mill. Because redwood timber fallers were a generally greedy bunch, lots of their logs that got skidded down to the landings were not really logs but limby, busted tree parts or “long logs” with the remains of worthless treetops attached to them. So the slash piles were made up of shattered treetops, hitchhiking limbs, forty-foot long strips of “busted” redwood bark, shorter flaps of bark, “bucked” (sawed) off chunks of broken trunk, bucked off “stobs,” (the spear-like remains of busted or torn off limbs extending from logs that were also called “gut gougers”), little sucker trees and lots and lots of pulverized dirt. Whenever the loader man got a chance (on this show he was running a giant, rubber-tired forklift that articulated in the middle), he’d “sweep” the surface of his landing of debris by dropping his lift and using its rear base plate as a broom.

The landings were lined up like the vertebrae of a snake because both sides of Spooner Canyon had been “clear-cut.” The remains of the forest made quite a sight. Every redwood and Doug fir tree over eighteen inches in diameter “At Breast Height” had been felled, somewhat de-limbed and “bucked” into logs. Because of so many trees felled all at once in so small an area, about every skinny little baby tree in the old under-story had its top knocked out of it, or had been smashed flat, or had been partially knocked over and was leaning at a grotesque angle. It was the first time I’d ever laid eyes on a clear-cut logging operation and, beyond the devastation, what was most striking was the amount of light that had been let into the canyon. Virtually nowhere was there any shade left, and the blond dirt was glaring.

Think of a mountain as a human hand propped up on its thumb and fingertips. The fingertips reach to the creek and they are called sub-ridges. The spaces between the fingers also reach to the creek and they are called side canyons. Spooner Creek, which runs for a couple of miles, had dozens of fingers and down the tops of each of them ran the main skid trails that were called “trunk trails.” Forking off from them and running more or less level into the side canyons were more trails called “branches.” Because “bull-lines” were only one hundred feet long, the branch trails couldn’t be much more than one hundred feet apart, one above the next going up the mountain. Together the trunk and branch trails made a “Christmas Tree” that covered every finger.

I was introduced to the catskinner I’d spend the next few months working behind. He was a very old and a very rotund, brown-skinned, blue-eyed, self-described half-breed Pomo Indian by the name of Lester Seymour. Without much more than a ritual handshake and a hearty “Howdy-do,” Lester climbed back aboard his loudly idling, knocking, popping Cat, took his seat behind the controls, made himself comfortable and then invited me to climb on up and to sit on down on the lid of the big metal toolbox that was bolted to the deck beside him. The Cat had a solid steel canopy (a “headache bar”) strong enough to function as a roll bar in case the machine tumbled down a canyon, and as the roof of a bunker in the case of falling trees, limbs and tumbling boulders.

Over the racket of his diesel engine Lester hollered for me to hold on tight to the middle support bean of the canopy that was welded and bolted into place directly in front of me. I was to keep my feet planted flat on the deck and my eyeballs glued straight up ahead watching out for overhanging limbs. Lester had to be watching the corners of his blade and other things besides, so he might forget about me there on his toolbox, a limb might get caught on the front beam of the canopy and, as we pulled ahead, get loaded like a rock in a catapult and then slap me upside the head and maybe knock me clean off the ass-end of the tractor.

The instant Lester was satisfied I’d digested all that, he yanked on his Johnson Bar, which engaged the clutch, and off we went, lurching forward on clanking and squealing tracks. We “crawled”—bulldozers are sometimes called “crawlers”—up the truck road a ways and then we pivoted abruptly and joined a trunk trail leading up a canyon side so steep that, to stay aboard the lid of the toolbox, I had to throw my weight forward as if I was aboard a rearing horse. With me holding on to the beam with both hands, the floor with my feet and the toolbox with my ass, we’d nearly made it to the top of the mountain when, the tracks of the bulldozer unable to keep purchase in the pulverized dirt, we started sliding backward.

To keep the machine from sliding backward out of control, Lester let out with a yip, simultaneously dropped his blade with a thump and revved his already screaming engine, making the bulldozer’s tracks race faster forward even as we kept sliding backward.

Finally, after Lester had managed to get us stopped by building a big mound of churning dirt under the backside of his dropped blade, he gawked at me all wide-eyed and breathless and grinned like we’d just gotten away with something.

“Gotta get the grease monkey to loosen these tracks so we can get some traction,” Lester hollered as he nonchalantly started us back up the grade. We made it up to just about exactly where we’d gotten before when again the Cat broke loose, we slid backward down the hill and Lester yipped and got us stopped again.

“I need you to climb up front and set yourself atop the middle of the blade,” Lester hollered at me out of the side of his mouth. “We need more weight up front if we’re ever gonna make it up this damned little hill.”

And when my jaw dropped and the color drained from my face, Lester laughed lustily and advised me to pay him no mind.

That was one thing about Lester. He was tickled pink to have in his old age the golden opportunity to cut the teeth of a genuine greenhorn like me, and that was partly because of all of the bald-faced lies he’d get to tell me, and all of the tricks he’d get to play (the sliding Cat had been one of Lester’s tricks). Before the logging season was over, Lester would tell me about the collection of pioneer scalps his grandpa had collected, and about his Pit River woman who could conjure up some weird scary shit and, among other things, about the old days when the redwoods stood so tall it took two men and a boy to see to the top of one of them.

Beyond telling me lies and pulling tricks on me, Lester also got to work me to death. Back then on steep ground among the big trees, most everybody was a “highballer,” which meant they busted ass. Redwood logging was a seasonal form of employment, and with the big trees going the way of the buffalo, the whole idea was to get while the getting was good. Chokersetters in those days worked six ten hour days per week, and that didn’t count travel time. Often, especially if the skinner was a “gyppo” (slang for an independent contractor, which was a fancy title for a catskinner who owned the Cat he was abusing), he’d work even more hours than that while punching in skid trails to fresh lays of logs, or working on improving, or extending, the truck road.

Then just the day-to-day dangers that went along with the job proved that big tree lumberjacks weren’t exactly the forward-looking kind. Deep into autumn when the cookie jar was full, the rains were overdue and his worn out body was dog-ragged, a logger might look forward to getting laid off for the winter. Maybe he’d look forward to collecting some “rocking chair money” from the State and, between time spent licking his paws and scratching his private parts, cutting a bit of firewood to sell “under the table” to help put some salt in the bacon.

Next, with spring coming, the cookie jar empty and the wife starting to get used to him lying around like a spoiled fireside dog, he’d look forward to getting back to the redwoods and back to work again. Naturally he might also look forward to the birth of a child, or the marriage of a child and that sort of thing. But when it came to logging and his chosen way of life, winter and spring were about the only things he’d ever have to look forward to. He’d look forward to winter and spring plus the occasional fat paycheck.

Another thing about Lester was he never took his jokes too far. He never used his position as my protector and mentor as an excuse to torment me or to take chances with my life. Since it’d been left to Lester to cut my teeth in the redwoods, he was going to do it right and that meant, front and center, keeping me alive and kicking and showing up for work the next morning. Lester was going to keep me safe by teaching me to watch out for myself (something I was already fairly good at). Lester was going to show me how to “highball,” too, which he reckoned was the only way to stay alive in the woods long term—long term meaning for any real length of time. When it came to logging, the stupider you were about the woods, the quicker you’d get squished, run over, or driven into the dirt like a spike. To survive in the woods you needed to know the woods, and Lester wasn’t at all bashful about sharing with a greenhorn the lessons he’d learned during his lifetime. And since Lester was bound to do that then, just naturally along the way, he’d want to have himself a little fun to boot.

Out at Spooner Creek some of the skid trails were too steep to get the tractor up. Like the trail we’d been sliding backward on. Ordinarily Lester would only head down that trail, and then only providing he was dragging a full skid of logs as ballast and a big churning mound of dirt in front of his blade acting as his accelerator/de-accelerator ( drop the blade and build a bigger mound of dirt to go slower, or raise it to go faster). On a trail as steep as that one, each time you went down you took maybe an inch of dirt so that, before you were done and you’d cleared the finger of logs, the trail might be cut into the high spots of the mountain as much as five-foot-deep You also wanted your trunk trail to become a “straight shot” without high or low points, something your skidded bundles of logs tended to do on their own. Not much wider than the width of the bulldozer’s blade, with use the skid trails got to be like chutes, flumes or slides with vertical cut banks a person on foot couldn’t easily escape over. That’s why, my first ride up the mountain, Lester had shown me how that twenty-five ton Cat could slide backward like an ice skater. If ever I got into the habit of following the Cat up steep hills like that one, Lester wanted to show me, then I was asking to get squished.

By the way, to get a Cat tractor to slide backward, just put it to climbing up its maximum grade. With the blade of the Cat held just an inch above the ground, the machine’s center of gravity is kept low and the Cat climbs. But raise the blade and the machine’s center of gravity shifts backward, the Cat breaks free and there you go.

If going up on the steep stuff you never wanted to be following close behind a Cat, there was nothing to say you couldn’t follow it down the mountain if you wanted to. If you were feeling lazy or extra worn out, you could even hitch a ride sitting on the toolbox of the Cat. But I never liked riding down on the toolbox because, if somehow my hands lost their grip on the beam and I landed on the moving tracks then, if I bounced wrong, I’d get crushed under them. So, fearing the prospect of a gruesome death, I always followed the bulldozer down the mountain.

And since I was following along, I figured I may as well save myself some steps by riding the logs (Lester had first suggested it). I’d plant my spiked boots into the ends of two forty-footers and keep my body balanced and plumb like I was surfing. It was especially fun when the trail was a straight shot and carved deep like a toboggan run and, having six fat logs trailing as ballast and it getting on to the start of lunchtime, Lester would lift his blade, let go of his dirt, shift the Cat’s tranny into neutral and “free wheel” us down to the landing. We’d get up such a head of steam that we’d arrive in a massive cloud of dust that rose and billowed upward into the sky above the canyon like a giant smoke signal.

Another interesting thing was when logs broke loose. Ordinarily you’d drag logs behind the Cat with them “sucked up” to the winch. That kept their noses from digging into the dirt so much and made them come that much easier. But heading down steep ground, to keep a hold of the trail, you’d let the logs out some; give them longer rein because you wanted their noses digging into the dirt to act as brakes.

But still occasionally one or more logs would break loose and slam into the back of the Cat. Because of the friction in the middle of the skid, it was nearly always one of the outside logs that broke loose, and sometimes they’d clatter up the tracks of the bulldozer and bang and lurch forward as if they were on a conveyor belt. Almost instantaneously, a log might get up so much speed that it’s like an arrow out to beat you to the landing. When that happened, the chokersetter didn’t want to be riding the toolbox, and the Catskinner had to act fast. He needed to act fast because, if the “choker” (steel rope) lassoed around the runaway log’s nose broke like a thread, then one of its flying ends might slice him in half. And so the instant Lester heard a log slam into the back of the Cat, he’d immediately drop his blade, stand up on his brakes and slap his winch into neutral to let the spool “free wheel” and the log to go free.

A choker was typically a fifteen-foot-long steel rope that was three-quarters of an inch thick and weighed about twenty pounds (you usually worked with a set of six). On one end was a snub-nosed bullet shaped steel “nubbin” and on the other end was a loop that was called an “eye.” Between the eye and the nubbin was a sliding “bell” with a slot in it that fit the nubbin like a button hole fits a button. When the nubbin was fitted inside the sliding bell it made a noose that cinched down and “choked” the log when you pulled on the eye.

It terms of its operating parts, a choker was no more complicated than, say, a wheelbarrow.

Behind the Cat hung a forty-ton Hyster winch, and rolled up in the spool of that was a one-hundred-foot long, inch-and-an-eighth-thick steel cable called a “bull-line.” Knotted on the end of the bull-line was a heavy steel hook big enough to fit the eyes of eight chokers at once. To get the eyes of his “set” chokers wrapped around the hook on the bull-line was a major part of a choker setter’s job, and that usually meant pulling bull-line because, as a practical matter up on a canyonside, a Cat couldn’t always get up close to the logs.

When it came to pulling bull-line, you wanted to be pulling down the hill. Because of the steepness of the ground, the roundness of the logs and the pull of gravity, for safety reasons you never wanted to be spending much time downhill from logs. Or, when you were, then you absolutely wanted them anchored to the slope so that, unless you were awfully unlucky, they flat out couldn’t roll down on you like rolling pins and flatten you like you were a spot of dough for a cookie.

So, to stay above the logs, you cleared them off the mountain beginning at the ridge top and working your way down the fingers to the creek. Ideally, whenever you were working the logs below any branch trail in the side canyons, you hooked them all so that, when you dropped down to the next trail, not a single log was left above you.

Even putting aside considerations of safety, again because of the steepness of the ground and the pull of gravity, you wanted to be pulling your bull-line straight down the hill. In fact, the steeper the mountain, the easier the pull. The hook must have weighed at least twenty pounds, and even a one foot length of bull-line was Pittsburg blue steel heavy, especially when working against the winch to keep the cable tight in the spool (bull-lines had a way of going “haywire” and getting tangled in the spool if you didn’t pull against them to keep them taut).

Because of the need to keep the bull-line taut, even on flat ground in deep shade you wouldn’t want to be pulling out one-hundred-foot of bull-line more than a few times running. And when it comes to pulling bull-line up the hill, if you do even a small bit of that you’re going to get tuckered out real quick. Pull enough bull-line up the hill and you are going to get to panting, wheezing and seeing spots. If you’re bulldog strong you’ll to get far enough up the hill so that, when the bent coils in the cable finally overpower you and the bull-line retracts like an over-stretched slinky, you’re going to get dragged head first right back down the hill unless you let loose of the hook.

Anyway, when things were going smooth you’d hook one of more of your logs, escape to somewhere safe and then signal the catskinner to engage his winch. Once he’d engaged his winch, the spool started turning and the bull-line lifted off the ground and snapped tight, only one of three things could happen. Either your logs could “pop” out of the woods and get sucked toward the Cat, or the Cat could rear up and slide backward or, if the catskinner didn’t stop pulling quick enough, the rigging could break (usually a choker below the collar binding the eye, but sometimes the bull-line).

Because the woods were full of obstructions, a choker could be set that would roll the nose of a log up and over a stump, or make it back up and go around a “stander” (standing tree). Other hitches could be used to tie one log to another, nose to tail or side by side. The various hitches had names like “kicks,” “rolls,” “Swedes,” “bridles,” “jackpots” and “bar-buckles.” So knowing how and where to set a choker to get a log to smoothly pop out of the woods could get slightly complicated. Then to rig the ultimate smooth set—the “straight hook” that was six logs popped out of the woods all at once with no hold ups—took a fair bit of practice and a reasonable amount of know-how. Also, I should mention, sometimes just getting one single choker under and around one single log could seem near-on impossible.

Most any chokersetter, but especially a highballing greenhorn like me, was going to hit the limit of his physical endurance. A fellah would hit bottom usually two or three weeks into the logging season. His legs shredded by all of the climbing up and down, the pulling, lifting and dragging, his backbone turned to jelly, his grip weak, his gaze dim, he couldn’t eat enough food to make him feel strong, or get enough sleep to make himself stop feeling drowsy, or enough rest and relaxation to make him feel refreshed. A fair percentage of greenhorns, along with some others who’d allowed themselves to get lazy and out of shape during the winter, fell out before the new logging season was a month old. One morning their alarm clock would go off and they’d be unwilling to set their feet on the floor.

That’s how I’d gotten my job slinging steel behind Lester. The fellah I replaced could no longer pull himself out of bed. And then, about three weeks into my own season, I started wondering if the same thing would happen to me. Weaker day by day, sore, cut up and bruised, I started looking back nostalgically at stomping fleeces. And that had to be a sure sign that I was in the wrong line of work. I still remember the exact moment when I hit bottom. It was an extraordinarily hot afternoon, I was working the sunny side of the canyon and for maybe ten minutes I’d been struggling to punch a choker under a four-foot thick log that was bedded atop a mishmash of broken, bastard limbs. I’d finally found a place where my nubbin could almost break free to the other side—there was a glorious hole that was just a teensy bit too skinny and a weensy bit too short—but using stubbornness, rage and brute strength I’d tried to force my nubbin through. Now defeated in my aim and utterly exhausted, my hands shaking, my knees knocking, half-blind because of the salty sweat in my eyes and frustrated nearly to the point of tears, I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. I looked up and, beyond the smudges and smears on my eyeballs, I saw Lester. Without saying a word, he took the choker out of my hands and moved down the log a couple of feet. Kneeling on one knee, he stuck the nubbin under the log, probed with it, moved further down the hill a few inches, probed again and the nubbin slid through to the other side like a spoon through ice cream.

“Don’t ever let these logs outsmart you,” he advised me as he climbed back up toward his Cat.

After you’ve hit bottom, naturally you’ve got nowhere to go but up—or out. If you chose to stick with it, as I did, then your blisters started getting calluses on them, you started getting your “woods legs” and, no longer so newborn clumsy, you stopped constantly adding to your collection of bumps and bruises. As time went on, you even started getting a little bit graceful. Your torn down muscles slowly rebuilt and, as your skill level increased, you stopped wasting so many moves and so got much more out of burning the same number of calories. The logs popped out of the woods easier, the bull-line felt lighter and, by mid-season, you started feeling like Paul Bunyan. Back home admiring such a fine physical specimen as yourself in the mirror, you might trick yourself into thinking that you could chase down and bulldog a steer without using a horse.

And then, just when your head started swelling to the size of a county fair pumpkin, the grind of the months started getting to you and you started getting weaker again, more torn down and weary. Come October or November, with you again dragging ass, in your mind you’d start doing a little rain dance and praying for mud.

* * *

“Why pull bull-line when you ain’t got to?” Lester asked me one day after lunch. We were standing at the end of a branch trail about halfway up the mountain, and down below us was a side canyon with a wide bottom that was covered with a thick lay of fat logs. There were so many logs down there that the ground was just barely visible. Such a thick lay of logs was called a “jackpot” or a “pumpkin patch” because, especially if you were a gyppo and were getting paid “bushel rate” (by volume as measured by board feet of lumber), they represented easy money.

When Lester got excited, he rubbed his hands together. And now, overlooking the veritable bonanza of logs, he was rubbing his hands together and grinning like a Cheshire Cat. I was pretty well broken in by then—in fact I was entering my Paul Bunyan stage—and Lester, fairly well pleased with my progress, decided I was ready to learn how to “dive off.”

He asked me if I saw the truck road down there in the distance. Had I noticed how there was no cut bank between us; how the wide mouth of the canyon just sort of blended into the road? What was to keep us from taking the logs out from there? Had I noticed how, with virtually all of the logs laying side hill, nearly all of them were pointing at the road and so easy pickings? And look at the steep ground on the canyonside just below us. Did I see how the Cat could just dive off the embankment, slide to the bottom and onward to the truck road from there?

Seeing me nodding vaguely—it seemed to me there were a lot of stumps and logs between us and the truck road—was enough to make Lester to decide to dive off. He fetched his Cat, brought it to the end of the trail, squared it up to the grade and, grabbing a mound of dirt as a brake, flopped onto the slope and slid to the bottom and right into the middle of the pumpkin patch.

After that, we dove off about any chance we got. Though the technique played hell with the terrain and was outrageously dangerous (at least if you didn’t know what you were doing), there was simply no easier and quicker way to move logs. When we were diving-off most of the time I wouldn’t even have to unhook my chokers because, as Lester punched ahead on the Cat, he would pivot the logs in his way with his blade and lay them out parallel with the tracks. So when the winch of the Cat cleared the nose of a log, Lester would stop moving and I’d get in there and choke it. Then Lester would pull ahead, lay out more logs, stop and I’d go in and rig some more until we had six logs skidding and he was on his way to the landing.

About the only problem with diving off and rigging logs like that was, after you had two or three logs skidding, the loose ends of your empty chokers would get buried beneath them. The easiest solution was to ride the logs, which I did. Once we had two or three logs skidding, I’d jump aboard them, plant my spikes, grab up the ends of the empty chokers and pull back on them like they were the long reins on a stagecoach. The Cat would pull ahead and stop, I’d jump down, rig a log or two and then jump back up and away we’d go.

All and all, logging that way was easier than barking a shin.

* * *

One more thing about riding logs. A couple of seasons later I was slinging steel for a much larger and more reputable outfit, working behind a catskinner named Bryce. We were bringing a skid down the truck road and I was riding the tail of a fat forty-footer. Without me noticing, my new woods boss snuck up behind me in his company pickup truck and he blasted his horn at me. The sudden blaring about scared me to death, and I nearly tumbled off the log.

Yet, before I could get mad, my new boss was out of his truck and in my face. Did I know what would happen to him if OSHA came out and saw me riding logs? Did I have any idea what would happen to him if the insurance inspector caught me doing that? My God, man, could I even conceive of the amount of money I’d cost him if ever I fell off a log and broke an arm or a leg?

He went on some, but that was the gist of it. And after he’d laid down the law and he was back in his pickup truck and he was charging away in reverse gear and throwing up a big rooster tail of dust—my new boss was sort of speedy—it finally dawned on me what had just happened and why. While stung by the tongue-lashing, I had to laugh and shake my head because old Lester had gotten me again. Teaching me how to ride logs had been another one of Lester’s tricks.