Scaling Tall Timber
By
Dave Folsom
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, or incidents are either products of the authors imagination or used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, localities, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
Excerpts from this book were previously published as short stories Scaling Rexford in The West Wind Review 1992 and as Running with Moose in Running with Moose and Other Stories 2010
© Dave Folsom 1992, 2010 All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, copied or used in any form without the expressed permission of the author.
ISBN 978 1 453 75789 5
This book is dedicated to my wife, Sandy, who after fifty years still puts up with me.
Remember friend as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, so you shall be
Prepare for death and follow me
From the tombstone of Jeremiah Mahoney
Died June 24, 1885
49 yrs. 2 mos. 2 ds.
Canyon Ferry, Montana
Author unknown
CHAPTER ONE
Les sat across from me, his legs dangling under a buckskin lodgepole, scowling at his notebook in silence. His anger hadn't subsided during the morning and continued into our lunch break.
"You're crazy, man," he said to me, finally setting down the notebook and digging in his cruiser vest for lunch. Deep lines creased his forehead. "What you want to leave for?" When I didn't answer, he continued, "Who the hell am I going to drink beer with?"
We lounged in the cool shade of old-growth conifers deep in the Montana wilderness, work sweat running like rivers from under our aluminum hardhats. A breeze touched my skin, feeling good as I chewed cold roast beef. The long hike up the steep mountain had sapped our young hearts. Jumping from log to log following a preset compass line and measuring methodically between sample plots, the heavy forest and the heat made me breathe in short desperate gasps. The forest canopy shielded the hot late May sun, leaving us in a dark moist shelter of giant western red cedar and limby Englemann spruce. My companion wore his cruising vest like mine, heavy with compass, pencils, notebooks and tree measuring instruments over a flannel shirt and black logger jeans. We both wore heavy logger boots, heavy soled, tight-laced and calf-high.
Les picked our stride up the mountain, pushing my soda-cracker ass at near a dead run while dragging a two-chain-trailer tape for measuring slope. He didn't express his displeasure directly, but his killer pace hinted at it. When we finally stopped, he glared at me while standing in his new Buffalo calks, rocking back and forth on a wind-fallen alpine fir, daring the bark to slip. He towered over me, mouthing subtle queries like: "Why Sutton's Landing?" or "You know, don't you, that there ain't nothing there?" He'd been after me all morning since I'd told him about the transfer. He was right, of course, and those were the very reasons I'd accepted.
When we stopped at noon he wouldn't let up. The truth was he didn't need me to drink beer; Les could do a respectable job on his own. Lester Dermont at twenty-five stood a couple inches shy of my six foot-four, kept the all the local breweries in business single-handed and stilled the hearts of most women between six and sixty. He wore whiskers long, but neatly trimmed, dark black like his hair. On Saturday nights, Les drove the hundred miles to Butte with his Canadian friends to play semi-pro hockey. I only called him Lester when I wanted to get his goat. Tough as the hobnails on his calf-high logger boots, his left cheek carried a three inch puck scar from mouth to ear to prove it. He liked everyone to think he was western born and bred, but I knew his secret. He learned to play hockey on a park pond in his home town of Nutley, New Jersey.
"You're a damn fool, Scotty, why the hell would you want to go to Sutton's Landing?" he asked for the hundredth time. "Missoula's got the University." Les wasn't interested in the University of Montana as an institution of higher learning, although, like me, he'd graduated from the Forestry School. His thirst for knowledge ended with his diploma. His priorities ran to hockey, beer and women of all ages. I never could decide in what order he arranged them. Once when I asked, he said: "They're all number one!" amazed that I didn't know. We'd worked together nearly two years woods scaling and timber cruising for Van Sickle Logging. Van Sickle gypo'd for the Northwest Timber Company and the main office had offered me a transfer. To Sutton's Landing, Montana, an operation three hundred miles to the north and close the earth's end according to Les. He didn't know I'd asked for it.
Two weeks later, after a morning of listening to Lester Dermot question my sanity, I loaded meager belongings into my old Ford pickup.
Les leaned on my truck, his bushy head blocking the driver's window, finally accepting that I really was going, but wanting the last word. "You're gonna hate it, you know. A month I give ya, then you'll come screaming back begging me to show you the local night life."
"I don't think so," I said, anxious to be away and tired of his harping on me.
"I know why you're doing this," Les said, suddenly serious. "It's the wrong reason, guy. You got to put it behind you."
"I need a change." I ignored his attempt at condolence.
"If you say so."
"I do." I could smell smoke from Intermountain's teepee burner drifting through my truck windows. It hung over the town in a narrow cloud dropping ash like black snow. Rumor said they were going to outlaw the metal cones that burned sawmill residue day and night. Even the companies were looking for ways to get rid of them after last year's fire. Cinders from the teepee burner turned the logs decks in a spectacular fire that endangered part of the town and destroyed millions of dollars worth of sawlogs.
"Well, if you insist, I guess there's no talking you out of it."
"Nope."
"Well, get goin' then. You're blockin' the goddamn street here." Les slugged my shoulder with a ham-sized fist. "Tap 'er light," he said.
"Only way." I drove away and I could see him in the rearview mirror, standing on the sidewalk, shaking his head.
The sun beat hot on the mirage-covered highway that June day in 1963, softening the tarmac under my bald tires. Highway 93 ribboned north out of Missoula, passed the white-capped Mission Mountains, threading through timbered Flathead Valley and crossing into Canada at Roosville. The transfer papers said Sutton's Landing -- even the name sounded dull -- seven miles short of the Canadian line. I'd tucked papers and dreams, nestled between wool shirts and black denim pants, into a single tin suitcase. They told me to report Monday the fifth, but a cranky coil on the 1954 Ford delayed my departure until the seventh.
The suitcase in the rear of my pickup held everything I owned and wanted to keep, the scarce remains of two years with Van Sickle Logging. I'd decided late one night, after another night of too much beer with Les, that I needed a change. I didn't have a clue what I wanted or why I settled for Sutton's Landing except the feeling that somewhere there had to be something else. Manny Forsell, a professor of botany and tenured by one year, bought for his new wife the little house I owned on River Road. She'd spent the last two weeks doing what I'd never done and scrubbing an eleven month accumulation of dust. Could it have been that long? I drove by the house before I left and stared at the bright living room windows. They'd hung dark a long time.
When the transfer finally came, I envisioned the worst, a desolate outpost, miles from anything to do and a picture of lonely. The vision wasn't improved by Les' continual chipping. Sutton's Landing? Rumors among the woods crew called it a last resort station. Anyone headed there had one foot out the door. Only the real screw-ups tasted a stint at Sutton's Landing, the last worst place before you stepped off the earth. The Logging Manager at Sutton's Landing, named Horne and it fit, was reported to be the toughest around.
Ancient yellow pines, lining the road, guided me along, my path drawn by black asphalt and yellow paint lines. The long drive started pictures flashing in and out like a kaleidoscope, shining brilliant, and then fading away. Knuckles forced white by my grip on the wheel, I tried to shake the visions by closing my eyes hard. The Ford drifted onto the gravel edge and bounced. I forced the truck back, skidding and fish-tailing before it straightened, my heart pounding with old memories.
I topped the last hill at five-thirty in the afternoon after spending an hour in a Kalispell bar looking for an excuse not to go on. I passed through Whitefish and pointed the Ford north following a narrow frost-heaved highway. Sixty miles later, I stopped for my first look at the Kootenai Valley. Outwardly, it emerged the same as a hundred other mountain valleys, wide, regal and guarded by towering tree-covered peaks painted with patches of snow. The horn ring pressed into my chest as I stared through my pulp mill grime-covered windshield. The Kootenai River sliced its way out of Canada, flowing parallel to the highway cutting a wide and meandering course that created islands of thick brush and cottonwood and grass-covered bottom land. The meadows grew lush with the birth of spring between dry alder brush lined channels and backwater slews. The river's steep banked passage cut deep into the valley floor, hinting at a sleeping giant. Captured by snow-crested peaks, my eyes followed the rugged contour rising like a blue-green backdrop and scraping the sky. The afternoon sun languished low and cast dark shadows across the valley; shadows that were long, mysterious and almost magical played in the thick forest of yellow pine, tamarack, and fir. Despite the narrow two-lane highway, fading Burma Shave signs and a distant logging clear-cut, I felt as though I was the first to see it.
In the distance, the valley narrowed and the mountains closed like a gate on the river. I pulled back onto the highway watching vertical rock grow from the river's bank until the water, swallowed by the mountains, disappeared. The town, barely a few dilapidated cabins and a lingering hint of better times, lay wedged between steep foothills and the river. Before leaving Missoula, I asked why they called it Sutton's Landing and no one could remember.
The beauty of the view through the grimy glass of my old Ford took the edge off, but it didn't erase the sense of dread I felt. Sutton's Landing. My Shell Oil road map didn't list it.
The truck's radio faded in and out, crackling and echoing off the Ford's interior, its signal weakened by seventy-five mountainous miles. I turned up the volume to drown the silence. The speaker sounded static and the announcer's voice drained away. My mind drifted to Missoula. Sometimes I could see her face, alive and bright, shaded by a Yankee baseball cap resting on her foot-long ponytail. That day I searched for details, but saw only vague shadows.
The Ford coughed, hesitating momentarily as I passed a rusty metal sign lettered: Sutton's Landing - 1 mile. The highway dropped off an alluvial hill into the river bottom paralleling tall poplars lining the water's edge. Flocks of Mallards and a Whitetail buck watched warily from an alder and dogwood screen.
I stopped for gas on the edge of town. From the unattended gas pumps, I could see the log landing, the largest in the Northwest -- so the company claimed. Its capacity seven million board feet, the Sutton's Landing served five hundred thousand acres of private and federal forest. Rows of stacked logs from the finest timber-growing country in Montana covered the twenty acre landing. I'd read all the company propaganda.
Flat rail cars, loaded high with logs and ready to move, sat silently on a desolate siding, ready for the trip to the main sawmill at Libby, sixty miles south. The mill cut dimension lumber for people to build homes, lumber cut from giant trees centuries old and no one would care where the boards came from. The loading crane's steel boom stood in the middle of the decks like a guardian, with only the top section visible over piled logs.
I started the pump and gas gurgled in the Ford's single behind-the-seat tank. Across the road lay the town, most of the houses screened by ancient yellow pine. I could see two run-down cabins surrounded by un-kept lawns, hinting at bachelor quarters, while two lots away a neatly painted house stood in quick contrast to its neighbors. Stark white posts and a tight-wire fence surrounded a close trimmed yard. They'd added onto the house several times, each section supporting a different shed roof and a unique pitch. In the rear, I could see a stocky woman hanging wash. Each time she bent over she exposed the dark tops of her knee-high stockings. Down the highway, toward the log landing, a weathered sign declared - BAR - in painted block letters.
The wind strayed out of the north, following the river and caressing the pines. The claustrophobic closeness of the mountains and their towering height made me homesick for Missoula.
I paid for the gas in a chicken-coop like building sitting alone behind tall glass-topped pumps. Inside, over a rough lumber counter, multi-colored fishing lures decorated unpainted, water-stained drywall. Spider webs crawled from lure to lure in perfect geometric lines, undisturbed by a desperate angler. Homemade shelves displayed a few basic staples covered with the dust of time and the can of mushroom soup I chose left a circular white spot on the board. From a cold-water cooler, I grabbed a six-pack and halfway to the cash register, returned for a second. It promised to be a long night.
The woman behind the counter sat on a tall wooden stool puffing a filter cigarette. She watched me through cat-eye glasses, her pupils narrow and suspicious, following my movements through the store over the top of a paperback novel. The back half of the room sat empty with walls bare of product or display, its construction halted midway. In the back of my mind, I wondered if the soup dated post-World War II.
"You got cash?" the woman said, blowing smoke at the ceiling, "don't take checks. Twenty percent discount on Canadian money." She had clearly decided that I looked foreign.
Figuring I could always leave the soup, I answered, "all American," challenging her to deny it. Her eyes focused on my face as she warily watched me dig for five silver dollars and change. I felt as thought she was memorizing my features so she could describe me later to the Sheriff. I expected her to bite each coin, testing their authenticity, but instead she swept them into a worn Dutch Masters cigar box. The coins rattled as she searched for a dime to return. The cigar box cash register disappeared under the counter and the paperback propped back into place, she ignored me after the sale.
"Is everyone in town this friendly?" I said, smiling.
Her eyes flashed over the book and carved hate marks on my heart. "Yeah," she said, "some even friendlier, especially to smart-asses." Her face carried the heavy age lines of a serious smoker, giving her a wicked witch look. Ash dropped from the cigarette onto the counter and she absently brushed it away. I could feel her dagger eyes clawing my back when I went out the door.
I fired up the Ford and drove to the landing. They'd told me at Missoula to report to Augustus Horne, the logging manager. Horne had a reputation throughout the company. Whether it was good or bad depended on the source. One fact was for sure: no one in his right mind called him Augustus, at least not to his face. His few friends called him Gus and the gypos probably worse. I didn't intend on calling him anything since I was already two days late.
The offices stood on the north side of the landing, a mixture of clapboard frame construction and stacked cull two by fours. I parked next to a couple of yellow company rigs. A sign on the door pointed up an outside stairway to the logging manager's office. Since it was Sunday night, I didn't expect him to be in.
I sat in my pickup and stared at that stairway, wanting to turn tail to Missoula. I'd already made one friend and wasn't sure I could stand another. Around me, the buildings looked guilty of deferred maintenance, almost abandoned, as if the owners had decided to use them until they fell down and then move on. The place had the feel of extinction about it. Once prosperous and exciting, molded by fierce loggers and ornery gypo's, now it struggled in its last death throes, already dead and not knowing it. Wondering now why I'd asked for the transfer, I rummaged a church-key out of the pickup jockey box and debated opening a beer. The label, wet from the cold water cooler, slipped off in my hands. I returned the beer to the sack unopened; I still had to check in. It took some convincing before I realized that, despite the stories, Horne probably didn't have horns. I counted fifteen risers to the office door. I took them slowly; hoping the need to step on the last one would never come.
At the top of the stairs, I knocked on a wooden door with peeling paint. When it opened, the knob held by a bear of a man, I could see into a small office decorated with a gray Steelcase desk piled with a mountain of scale books and truck reports. An Underwood manual typewriter gathered dusk on one end of the desk. Nothing in the room suggested comfort.
"What do you want?"
He stood tall in the doorway, filling it completely with a red checkered wool shirt and high-water canvas pants over tight laced White high-heeled boots. He had dark wavy hair turning to silver and a solid face used to intimidate subordinates. His reputation as a hard, driven man ranged company wide and I suspected he hadn't endeared himself to the locals.
"Scott Jackson," I said, "they sent me up from Missoula. I'm a scaler."
"The hell you say. Every son-of-a-bitch that comes in here's a scaler. What makes you so special?"
"I'm good at it." I said, defiant.
"You'll have a chance to prove it. If you aren't good, I'll kick your skinny ass all the way back to Missoula. Come in here."
I followed him, ignoring his reference to my slight build, into a second office. This room was a duplicate of the first, though larger. Horne's office contained the clutter of a man who had held the same job, in the same space, behind the same scuffed oak desk, for too many years. Piles of records, scale books, truck reports and stacked boxes surrounded the room like a cardboard fort. His years at the remote camp resulted in lofty production records and skinflint cost figures earning Horne unquestioned respect in the New York Office. Word was that he ran the Sutton's Landing operation almost unhindered by upper management.
"You're late." Horne grumbled, parking himself behind the desk.
"Truck broke down."
Horne looked at me, raking me with his steely eyes, his jaw cast in granite and his lips pursed thin. "You get one free one from me," he said, the words coming from deep in his throat, "you just had yours, remember that."
If he expected an answer, I disappointed him. There was a long heavy silence before he continued. "How much scaling have you done?"
"Enough," I said, dredging up courage.
I could see a white thinning spot on the top of his head as he studied the papers on his desk. I stood waiting between the door frame, fearing that stepping in would mean surrender and I'd never be able to escape. His silver-streaked hair, noticeably compressed in a circle around his head by his hardhat band, probably accounted for his tight mouth. Those of us who wore the aluminum lids every day frequently had that distinct band line across our foreheads. His sun-darkened hands held a pen that jabbed at the paper in front of him. His square frame tugged at his heavy wool shirt and sinewy arms bulged out of rolled sleeves. From my doorway perch, I couldn't see horns.
"Well, come in here," he growled.
I stepped into the room. Cream painted shiplap walls gave it a storeroom look, as if the desk and its occupant where an afterthought. His dark eyes bored holes in everything.
"You ever scale on trucks, old-growth timber that averages four feet on the butt? We're running twelve-foot bunks on off-highway trucks. Defect runs twenty-three percent, so I want you to watch it. This company doesn't pay for rot."
"I know the defect rules," I said.
Horne's head came up and his eyes gathered me in, inspecting me and assessing what he saw. I steeled myself and stared back.
"Sit down," he said, "you're too damn tall." He waved at a hardwood chair someone had painted green. Under the chipped enamel, I could see its previous yellow color.
I stepped across the room slowly, moving in a practiced gait, feinting a minor show of resistance. I wanted him to see that I too had White logger boots laced tight.
"Let me tell you what it's like here, kid. We start loading in the woods before daylight. The first truck rolls in about six in the morning. There'll be a truck every hour all day long until six or seven in the evening. I want your scale books totaled and in my office every night. We work six days a week between breakup and first snow." Horne hesitated to see if he was getting any reaction. I sat stock still and said nothing. He continued, "You have any problems with any of this?"
"Nope," I said.
"Good. If you screw-up, you'll be out of here in a heartbeat."
"I'll try to stay around a while. Where's the bunkhouse?"
He looked hard at me. "A smart mouth will get you out as fast. I've been riding herd on gypo's since before you were born. Anytime you think you're tough enough to try me, come ahead." He waited for that to sink in and when I didn't argue, he said, "You got a stick?"
"Yes."
"You be at the scale shack by six tomorrow morning. The bunkhouse and mess are downstairs to the back."
"Where's the scale shack?"
He gave me a look that suggested that if I couldn't find it, I'd better start back for Missoula. "Never mind," I said, "I'll find it." I stood and started to leave. His gruff voice halted me at the doorway.
"Kid," I heard him say behind me. When I turned, he was scribbling on a piece of paper. He looked up and shook the pen at me. "Play it straight and we'll get along fine."
"Only way I play," I said.
I took the stairs two at a time going down. I swung into the door at the bottom and stepped onto the main floor. It smelled of boiled cabbage, burnt grease and mildew. This building had once been the center of night time activity, swelled to the seams with burly loggers covered with the day's sawdust and work sweat, working man hungry and wolfing beefsteak and beans in prodigious quantities. The far end served as a kitchen and a hundred-man mess, the middle showers and lavatories, and the rest bunk rooms. I explored the silent hallways, shooing the ghosts of past lumberjacks and opening windows to air the place. I wondered how long it sat un-used. I stored my gear in an empty bunk room, looked over the bare varnished shiplap walls and searched for the kitchen. When I found it, it echoed my footsteps, each step on the worn plank floor bouncing from wall to wall. In one corner, an antique gas cooking grill looked serviceable, along with tables, chairs, and a commercial refrigerator with the doors hanging open. I turned it on, listening to the compressor protest at first, and finally smoothing out to steady hum. I could only hope it would get cold.
Back out in the parking lot, I popped a beer, slaughtered the soup can with a GI can opener and ate dinner sitting alone on the tailgate of the Ford. The landing lay quiet except woodpeckers searching for boring beetles in the log decks and the occasional creak of the loader's steel boom swaying in the gentle evening wind.
I drank a second beer wandering across the landing, walking between stacks of logs, my feet cushioned by a carpet of ground bark. The shadow of overhanging logs crisscrossed the ground as I walked through the narrow log canyons. The wind picked bark and dust in sudden swirls and carried pitch odor under my nose.
It was a familiar smell. Fresh sawdust, pitch and diesel smoke mixed had been my working companions on a dozen different logging operations. I felt comfortable with the smells and the sounds. They made it easier to force her image into the back of my mind.
I first noticed him in a section of old growth white pine logs. The huge log piles created a maze of cavities, tunnels and hiding spots, every one of which could crush a man to pulp if the deck shifted. Only an idiot would crawl around in them courting demise. He stalked me like a cat, quietly, ducking to hide when I tried to spot him. When I moved, he moved and when I stopped, so did he. Finally tired of the game, I climbed to the top of the log deck and waited. Before long, I heard the scratches of his toes dragging on bark. When he was close enough, I reached over a knurled fir and snatched him out of his hiding place.
"Owww...," he cried.
"Rather late to be out, isn't it?" I asked.
He looked at me through wild brown, eight-year-old eyes, his face twisted in defiant fear, daring me to let him go. He clamped his jaws together and didn't say a word. I carried him to the ground by the straps of his baby bibs and when I set him on his feet, he bolted like a frightened animal. In two steps, I gathered him up again and held him under my arm. Walking across the landing, I set him on the pickup tailgate and stared him down. "It's dangerous in those log decks," I growled, "if they were to shift, they'd crush you like a bug."
He looked up at me, his eyes flickering, looking for an opening, preparing for flight.
"Cat got you tongue?" I said.
"Nope."
"What do you know, it can talk. Where do you live?"
Before he could answer, a canary yellow company pickup slid in next to us. The driver stuck his gray-topped head out the window and hollered at the young boy. "Jake! Damn it, boy, you know better than to be over here. Your mamma will be worried sick. You get home now!"
The boy jumped off my tailgate and ran like the wind, disappearing into the tall pines surrounding the landing. I looked back at the man in the pickup. He held his hand out through the window. "Howdy," he said, "you must be Jackson, the new scaler."
His weathered face smiled naturally, easily, as if he were enjoying himself always. The lines radiating from his mouth read friendly and I liked him instantly, a rarity for me.
"Right on both counts," I said, shaking the rough hand. His grip clenched mine firmly.
"Orie Federson," he said, "you and I are going to spend a lot of time together. I'm your scaling partner."
"Glad to meet you. That your kid?"
"No, I'd have tarred him good if he'd been one of mine. He belongs to Rita Conley. Lives over on the Tally Lake Road. Barber-chaired stump killed her husband five or six years ago. He never knew what hit him."
"Tough." A woods sawyer in old growth timber worries constantly about a barber-chair. A half-sawed tree, rotten in the stump, slabs off and falls away before the sawyer can jump back. The slabbed butt flies out and slaps a man with the force of a freight train. The stump looks like a high backed chair and the sawyer is crippled or dead. I knew of more than a couple of sawyers who had been barber-chair maimed or killed.
"Rita does the best she can."
"Kid shouldn't be playing in the decks," I said.
"You're right. I'd better tell her about it. Hop in; I'll give you the guided tour of the place on the way over."
I slid into the yellow Chevy, a duplicate of hundreds the company owned. The egg yoke fleet color carried over into the interior and covered everything but the seat. Company vehicles were less than basic, no radio or air-conditioning and not much of a heater. On freezing winter days, the defroster barely cleaned the windshield. We covered the radiators with cardboard, plugged all the air vents with scrap cloth and still the temperature in the cab rarely climbed above the outside by more than a few degrees. We wore long johns, wool pants and felt boots to ride in the trucks. They came equipped with six cylinder engines, four tires, doors, and little else. After the first month, they were dirt and diesel fuel encrusted, which hid most of the body damage.
Federson's truck contained a supply of scale books, a Victor electric adding machine, two scale sticks, a supply of pens wrapped with a rubber band, and a battered copy of Dilworth's Log Scaling Handbook. I moved a week's supply of scale books to sit. Dust rose from the floor as we bounced across the log landing.
"This is the main haul road," Federson said. He looked at me, sizing me up, I guessed, wondering what made his new scaling partner tick. "You married?"
"Nope."
"Girl friend?"
"Nope."
I could see him looking at me out of the corner of his eye, holding the steering wheel high with both hands and wondering. "Just making conversation," he said.
"Sorry, didn't mean to be short. It's been a long day. I'm a lot better in the morning."
Federson laughed. "I hope so, the guy you're replacing growled at his mother until after noon."
"What happened to him?"
"Didn't get along with Horne."
Orie Federson didn't elaborate. I wasn't surprised. According to bunkhouse rumor, Horne went through scalers frequently. The gypos and the company crew ran a gambling pool betting how long any new scaler would last. Hot wind blew in the open windows of the truck and dust boiled up behind. My hands felt sticky and my throat cried for cold beer. I felt glad it wasn't far to a store.
"You been here long?" I asked, making conversation in an attempt to appear friendly.
"All my life, I was born here."
"How long have you scaled for the company?"
"Oh, nearly ten years. Ten years of climbing trucks and adding scale until the very late hours of the night."
"How do you get along with Horne?"
"He's okay, you'll get used to him. Do your job and he won't bother you. Rumor has it you asked for this job."
"I must have been crazy," I mumbled, more to myself than to Federson. I couldn't get a grip on what I was looking for, but it sure wasn't this. Seventy-five miles to any town over five thousand made it feel like I'd dropped into a wilderness. How would I fill the hours after work? Never much of a drinker, I'd developed the habit to its limits already, and the prospects of swilling beer night after night had little appeal. Already I was beginning to feel the loneliness creeping into my bones and capturing my soul. Maybe Les had been right. Riding in a pickup next to a man I'd just met, I wondered when the end came, if this remote station represented a form of punishment. The yellow truck burned up the steep dusty road, leaving a boiling cloud of forgotten memories and my parched throat choking floating cab dirt. Orie drove with both feet in the carburetor, sliding on every corner in the loose road gravel, both hands at twelve o'clock, hunched over the steering wheel and talking to me all the while. When we finally reached the top of the hill, I felt glad to be alive.
The double-lane gravel-surfaced haul road climbed out of the river bottom onto alluvial hills before doubling back into the mountains. A thick mixture of old and second-growth ponderosa pine and Douglas fir screened both sides of the road. Orie turned off the main road on to a dirt lane that wound east though rolling prairie grass and scattered bull pine. A half-dozen mule deer doe scattered at our approach, bouncing on spring loaded legs into safe timber.
Orie followed the lane to a single story frame house situated on the edge of the glacial hill overlooking the log landing. It sat surrounded by pines at the end of a driveway paved with knee-high grass. Gray paint curled at the siding edges and the front screen door hung askew. An attic dormer showed off intricately carved fascia and matching shutters, a silent monument to better days. At one time, someone had spent craftsman's sweat on the house. Now it showed the ravages of time, warped boards, peeling paint and a sagging foundation, subtle signs of forgotten maintenance.
"This is it," Federson said, mowing tall grass with the pickup's bumper to a spot next to the house. Up close the exterior looked worse.
A young woman stood behind the warped screen, watching us step out of the company pickup. Orie dated himself by taking off his canary colored hardhat when we reached the steps.
"How are you, Rita?" he said, holding his hardhat at his side. I stood beside him, hands in my pockets because I didn't know what else to do with them. I wished for a hardhat to hold.
She opened the screen and stepped out on the stoop. Her hair, tied in a tight bun, looked amber in the evening light. She wore a plain cotton print dress to just below her knees and faded brown shoes. There were pain lines radiating from her seasoned eyes that disappeared when she smiled. The transformation fascinated me as I watched it several times while she talked to Orie.
"Just fine, Orie," she said, looking at me.
"I'd like you to meet Scott Jackson, new scaler up from Missoula," Federson said. Turning to me, he continued: "This is Rita Conley."
"How are you, Scott?" The lines disappeared again and she brushed strands of loose hair with long slender fingers. The evening shadowed her face, hiding from view the story in her eyes and making me guess from the soft musical voice.
"Fine, thanks," I choked. "Met your son a while ago. Good looking kid."
"Thank you. He's a bit of a handful."
"Jake was in the log decks again. Scott pulled him out. I thought you ought to know."
"Thanks, Orie, I'll speak to him. Do you have time for coffee?"
Orie looked embarrassed when he turned to me. "We better go, thanks anyway, Rita."
"Right," I said, "long day tomorrow. Orie's got to make a scaler out of me. Good to meet you."
The woman acknowledged me with a nod of her head. I had my hand on the truck's door handle when the boy dashed around the corner of the house and stood next to his mother. She draped her arm over his shoulders. I could easily see the mother-son relationship locked in his delicate facial features, high cheekbones and sensitive mouth. The resemblance ended in his eyes, a moist brown instead of her deep blue, and filled with a fierce challenge. Below the neck, he was his father's son, blocky and tough.
They stood together, underneath the hand carved dormer, in front of a decaying home, worn from years of rain and sun, watching Orie back through the tall grass to the main road. What was her story, I wondered? The answer eluded me and I tried to convince myself that I didn't care. What could possibly hold her here?
"What do you think?"
"About what?" I answered.
"Rita," Orie said, looking at me questioningly, "not bad looking, don't you think?"
"Not bad," I said, noncommittal, hating myself because I was, and hating Orie for taking me there, and hating the memories that rattled around in my brain like noxious weeds, sprouting and growing each time dark clouds dropped a little rain.
"...should get together." Orie's words penetrated finally and I had to guess at his complete statement.
I didn't say anything and Orie dropped the subject and said nothing else except to point out the scale shack when we passed it. He dropped me off at my pickup and said he'd see me in the morning.
I sat alone on the tailgate and drank the rest of the six-pack. The beer tasted warm and bitter, but I hoped it would make me sleep. Sometime after dark I stumbled into the stark bunkhouse room, my faltering footsteps echoing in the dark silent hallway. I slept fitfully, fully dressed lying on unmade stripped cotton ticking.
CHAPTER TWO
My first morning in Sutton's Landing rose early, the dawn flooding the bunkhouse room shortly after five. The room in new daylight smelled of old shellac and fir pitch. The age darkened varnish on pine board walls gave it a dismal feel and I closed my eyes hoping it was all a dream. Every time I opened them, the same bleak room stared back, reminding me that I'd asked for this, like it or not. The bed, U.S. Army surplus in olive drab, had flat steel bands tied to small springs at each rail and a two inch mattress that sagged in the middle. I couldn't sleep anywhere but the center unless I tied myself down. My back ached from having both my feet and my head elevated.
I struggled to move, knowing that if I missed my call at six, Horne would eat me raw for breakfast. Finally, dressed and ready, I checked the refrigerator and it felt cold, but empty. Groceries had to be on top of my list before nightfall. I left the bunkhouse at twenty to six and faced the day without breakfast.
The scale shack sat on the far side of the landing, more than a quarter mile away, but I walked the first day, anxious to see the place in action. When I reached it, I knew from the yellow pickup sitting alongside the small square building that Orie Federson beat me to work.
The ten by twelve structure served as shelter, office, shade and rest station and like most of the buildings in Sutton's Landing, supported walls built of cull two by four studs laid up like little square logs. A double coat of whitewash completed the decor. It had a single non-opening window, boot-worn blue gray paint on a two by six plank floor and a heavy solid oak door, salvaged from a closed funeral parlor. The door opened out instead of in and the flat pitched roof, covered with ninety-pound rolled roofing, leaked whenever the wind drove rain from the north. I later became intimate with every nook and cranny, crack and cobweb, but that first morning in June, 1963, the shack looked strange and tacky. The only thing that made it bearable was a clear blue sky and the tall rugged mountains. Landing noises surrounded me and the air carried an early morning nip.
Screaming diesels and metal against metal noise filled the morning with work music. The haul back line on the crane log loader sang a shrill tune and the tall black steel boom swung heavy logs through the crisp June air. I could see a Caterpillar D-8 dozer snorting choking smoke as it pushed dirt and bark into a pile. The landing woke early.
I opened the ex-mortuary door and peered in. Orie Federson sat at a discolored oak desk reading a recent scaling procedure manual. The desk wore battle scratches earned during thirty years of scaler abuse. Scale books, stacked in piles of three or four, surrounded a shiny white Olivetti ten-key calculator. This technological pioneer weighed over twenty pounds and looked misplaced on the desk corner. The Olivetti sat like a rose in the midst of decadence. Nothing else in the room could be considered new. We scalers applauded the speedy Olivetti, which replaced tortoise-slow Victor hand cranks and rotary calculators. On the other side of the room a small table filled the corner alongside an olive-drab four-drawer file cabinet. Everything in the room carried a brass tag with a black inventory number.
Orie looked up at me. "Hi, partner," he said.
"Morning," I said.
"Make yourself at home. We'll spend a lot of time in here. Coffee's just finished brewing." He pointed across the room.
"Thanks."
A dented aluminum percolator bubbled on a grease-coated hot plate. The single burner cooker rested on a one by ten shelf supported by two steel ell brackets. Its friction tape wrapped cord crawled up the wall and across the ceiling to a single duplex outlet, the wire fastened by metal staples. Two brown clay mugs held down a ring-stained paper towel and a box of sugar cubes lay to the side.
"Pour me a cup, too. Mine's the one with hair." Orie laughed at his own joke and left me to decide which of the two had the least coating. It was a difficult choice, as neither cup looked as if it had seen soap in a decade. I poured a little coffee in both cups, swirled it around and threw the result out the door.
"Don't worry," Orie laughed, "I brew it strong enough to kill even the big ones!"
I took a sip, burned my tongue beyond hope and choked on the bitter taste. Positive it would float a lead spoon, I handed Orie his cup and threw mine out. Orie was right; it took one tough critter to survive his coffee. I never quite made the grade.
"Ever scale on trucks before?"
"Nope." Horne had asked me the same question and I'd slid over the answer. At the other logging operations where I'd worked, we scaled on the ground. A Michigan log-loader, its Detroit diesel snorting ink-black smoke, spread the logs with hydraulic arms allowing us to inspect each piece. Simple compared to scaling on trucks.
"Ain't so bad. The truck pulls between the ramps and we throw a two by twelve plank across behind the trailer. The front man works off the truck frame and the rear man off the plank. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it. Check Scaler won't be here until the end of the week." Orie's eyes betrayed amusement despite the serious tone in his voice. I knew he was testing me, seeing if I would be fun to work with or a cross he'd have to bear.
"Don't worry about me," I said. "I have Check Scalers for lunch at least once a week."
Orie laughed, shoving his chair back and rising to his feet. "You'll be all right," he said. "Come on, I'll give you the tour."
The parallel wooden ramps were about three feet high and far enough apart to allow a logging truck to drive between them. There was a safety rail on the outside edge, a thirty inch walkway and steps at either end. The loaded trucks sat between the ramps and we measured every log and entered the number of board feet in a scale book. We estimated defect deductions, like rot, shake, check, or sweep, based on a combination of knowledge of the area, Kentucky windage, rules of thumb, and wild-ass guessing. It was an inexact science and the center of considerable debate by both loggers and company officials. Scalers, certainly guilty of short (long) sticking, or having a wide (narrow) thumb, received suspicion from both company officials and loggers. Since the gypos worked by the piece, and their livelihood depended on net scale, they had a self‑interest in how well scalers did their job. Since we worked for the company, the gypos never ceased to believe that, although the Forest Service check scaled us weekly, we were robbing them blind. Most of the controversy centered on the amount of defect the uncut log contained.
The company, on the other hand, favored heavy deductions for defect and scaling speed. Nothing raised Horne's blood pressure faster than two trucks backed up at the scale shack and he tracked defect percentage with a microscope. If it varied more than a percent or two from the mill run, Horne would check scale every load himself and God help the scaler if he'd become careless.
"Every two weeks the Forest Service will pick two loads and have them laid on the ground for check scaling. Once a month they check scale the trucks. I hope you skills are sharp," Federson said, hinting that if they weren't, I'd better start packing.
"They are," I answered. We were outside, standing next to the wooden ramps. I climbed the stairs and walked the length of the walkway. "Doesn't look too tough."
"First truck should be along any minute, and then we'll see." Orie grinned at me, throwing out the challenge and wiggling the bait to see if I would rise to it. "Trial by fire, as they say."
"Come on, trucks!" I said, biting hard.
"It ought to be a fun day."
The sun peeked over the east mountains while we stood beside the ramps that morning, getting to know each other and testing the water. The air warmed slowly chasing the early summer chill and I looked across the river at the steep mountainside, so close it seemed touchable and awed by the beauty of it. I knew I would have trouble hating this place.
"How are the drivers?" I asked.
"Most are okay, except Rags. He has trouble keeping sober long enough to get loaded. He'll be the last in nearly every night."
"Why do you call him Rags?"
"Wait until you see his truck, then you'll understand. The company drivers have off-highway Autocars with twelve foot wide bunks. Then there's the gypo drivers, all with eight-wides, Buck Henry, Charlie Davis, 'Swede' Tolson, Willis Sooner, and, of course, Rags. Willis has five brand new black Ford 9000s with Cummins diesels. Drives one himself, his wife drives another, and he hires out the other three. The hourly drivers vary from week to week. Willis has trouble keeping drivers. Wait until you see Becky Sooner, she's a pistol."
"Sounds like enough to keep us busy."
"You believe it." Orie looked across the landing. "Here comes the first. Hear the Jake brake?"
I could. A diesel truck's compression brake snorted its distinctive bellow when our first customer dropped over the hill and started down the long grade into the landing. My five-dollar Timex read six-seventeen in the morning. The sun barely peeked into the narrow Kootenai Valley that day and I was about to get my initiation in truck scaling. I stood tall beside the dilapidated scale shack and watched a mustard-colored Autocar pulling a log trailer with twelve foot bunks maneuver between the wooden ramps. The driver sat in a single width cab -- there was no passenger side -- dwarfed by the mass of the truck and its load. Three forty foot logs, I couldn't believe my eyes. In Missoula, we averaged twenty to thirty logs to the load, an exceptional load went fifteen. I looked at my woefully inadequate scale stick and saw fifty inches maximum, not enough. Orie grabbed a couple of long sticks from behind the oak desk. He handed me one.
"These are for the really big ones," he said.
Orie and I scaled the first two loads together. He worked off the tractor frame and I stood on the two by twelve behind. Orie would tap on each log and by holding my stick on the log I could tell which one he was measuring. By yelling, we determined who had the small or scaling end. The drivers, one company and one gypo, ignored me and talked little to Orie. The next truck, driven by a gypo named Buck Henry, squeaked and groaned between the ramps carrying nine perfectly formed larch logs with hardly an inch of taper. Buck stood five-foot-five alongside his dusty Kenworth, short and beefy in a khaki shirt and faded blue jeans. He waded through bark and dirt chewing a tobacco wad, his hard eyes raking me full length.
"How's it going?" I said, scale stick under my arm and writing in my scale book.
Buck Henry spit through gaped front teeth and wiped his chin with a beefy arm. "What's-it-to-ya-kid?" he growled. Henry's green checkered wool shirt bulged over a barrel chest and beer-swollen belly. He walked bowlegged, swaggering like a barnyard cock, secure in his territory.
"Nothing special," I said, "just making conversation."
"Pay attention to what yer doin'."
He handed me his load ticket reluctantly, positive a know-nothing kid was about to cheat him out of the best load he'd had in weeks. I climbed on the truck frame and started only to find Buck Henry, reeking of Copenhagen snuff, looking over my shoulder scrutinizing each measurement. The first log, a near perfect larch of thirty inches, posed no problem. The next was a butt log showing a twelve inch heart check. As required, I walked the ramp to the rear of the load to view the other end of the log. Without comment, I deducted the defect and wrote the net scale in my book.
"Jesus Christ, that ain't no heart check, that's just a little sun split, probably don't go in more than a few inches."
I ignored Buck Henry's weak argument and continued through the rest of the logs. When I finished, I jumped down, slid the plank back onto the ramps and started for the scale shack.
"Well, it's over fifteen thousand, ain't it?"
Buck Henry was testing me, wanting me to estimate the size of the load, to see if I had an eye for truck volume. As scalers, most of us played a game with ourselves, estimating a load before scaling and writing the figure down at the top of the page in the scale book. Later, when we added the loads, the test was how close you could come on individual loads. Most of us were pretty good at it.
"Not much over fourteen," I said.
"You going to add it?"
There was a lull and I had time and I needed to prove something, and Buck Henry looked a good prospect. He followed me into the shack, spitting loudly before entering the door.
"Howdy, Buck," Orie said, pushing away from the Olivetti and letting me sit. I fingered the keys noisily, entering the figures and finally stabbing the total button.
I leaned back and stretched for dramatic effect. "Fourteen thousand two hundred, net, pretty fair load."
"Should have been more," Henry said, dropping the last word on his way out. He didn't argue though and that was a good sign. Orie didn't say a word, but I knew he'd noticed the figure scribbled at the top of the page. Two more trucks entered the ramps and we both grabbed our sticks. I left the room feeling better and ready to beard the rest.
The loads came in bunches all morning and Orie and I had little time for conversation. We would each scale a truck and knocked them off two at a time. The drivers grudgingly turned their load slips over to me and the kindest comment I received was, "Jesus H. Christ, kid, hurry it up, will you!" Most of the criticism wasn't repeatable.
"Don't let them get to you," Orie said at noon, in the midst of a temporary lull.
"They don't," I lied.
"They're on edge. There's dam talk again."
"What's that?"
"The Corps of Engineers are here again, poking' around."
"...at what?" I asked.
"Back in the thirties, the government decided to build a hydroelectric dam across the river, about twenty-five miles downstream from here. They say it will back water forty miles into Canada."
"Jesus," I said.
"Right where we stand will be two hundred and fifty feet underwater."
I looked around at the steep tree-covered mountains and tried without success to imagine where the water line would be. Would it reach as high as Rita Conley's house that I'd visited with Orie the night before? Somehow I couldn't picture the landing, the town, everything underwater.
"They must think there's a need for it," I said.
"Sure. They held a meeting in Eureka two years ago. Some engineer from Denver said they'd build us a new town and give us reasonable prices for our places. The new town would be up on the hill, above the water. Shore-side lots, he called them." Orie's face held contempt for the words, as if he had difficulty spitting them out. "They said it would provide electricity and control flooding downstream. Some of the old-timers asked what would happen if we refused to move. The guy stood up there and said they'd condemn us."
"They call it the right of eminent domain," I said.
"I don't care what you call it, they're messing with people's lives," Orie said, venomously.
"Nobody ever guaranteed fair. Some have to sacrifice for the common good. The majority rules, that's what democracy is all about." I said it almost convincingly, like I believed it. "Have they appraised any of the places yet?"
"No."
"There, you see, you don't even know what they're going to do yet. Maybe it won't even happen. Thirty years of planning is a long time."
"I don't know," Orie said. We were back in the tiny shack, sorting out our books, preparing them for summation and taking a break. Orie sat wearily at the old desk. "I used to think it would never happen, but now I'm not sure. Those damn carpetbaggers are hanging around more and more."
My stomach growled, knowing it wouldn't see food for hours yet. I considered Orie's coffee as a stabilizer and thought not, recognizing the possibility of terminal heartburn.
Orie dragged a battered tin lunch box out from under the desk and uncovered baloney and olive loaf sandwiches and fruit in a Tupperware cup. He unwrapped a baloney and took a big bite. "I guess if it happens, it happens. I was looking for a job when I found this one."
"Wouldn't the company move you somewhere else?"
"They would, but it's hard for an old man like me to move. I'm pretty set in my ways."
I sat at the little table across from Orie without a lunch. "You'll find something," I said.
"Aren't you going to eat? Better do it now, before another bunch comes."
"I'm on a diet," I said.
"Bullshit, here, have one of mine. My wife always makes me an extra. You don't look like you'd make one seventy with a pocket full of rocks."
"Close, one sixty-seven and a half. Thanks." I accepted the sandwich and wolfed it down. It couldn't have tasted any better if it had been a T-bone steak. My stomach, worried that my throat had been cut, accepted Orie's sandwich with pleasure.
The afternoon started with two company trucks loaded with three sixty-inch white pine logs each and a gypo carrying fourteen larch and a couple of fir. After the two company trucks, I took the gypo, an ink black Ford, shiny new and loaded high. I walked to the cab to get the load ticket.
The driver looked down at me with bright green eyes and fire red hair falling carelessly from under a fluorescent orange hardhat. The letters B E C K Y were hand painted across the front of her lid in yellow. Her gaze captured me from the soles of my boots to my forehead with appraising female interest. Her frank look came from years of practice. She filled a blue flannel shirt over tight blue jeans and a spider waist.
"Well, hi-there," she said.
Rebecca Sooner stood six foot tall and moved with the practiced control of a woman who enjoys the reaction of men around her. She slid out of the truck seat and dropped to the ground on cat's feet, her green hunter eyes dancing with the devil when she handed me the load ticket. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Orie grinning, enjoying my discomfort, watching Rebecca Sooner flirt with young new blood.
"Orie!" she demanded, "introduce me to your new partner."
"Becky Sooner, this is Scott Jackson, late of Missoula. He's the new scaler."
"Pleased to meet you, Scott." She grabbed my hand and held it. I guessed about thirty-five, but holding it at arms length. Her long oval face held a hint of freckles, smooth skin and narrow inviting lips. She'd lost little of her natural beauty.
"Hello," I said.
"My, you're a tall one," she said, running her eyes full length. "I bet you're a good scaler, too."
"I try to be."
"Well, do a good job for Becky." She winked at me, a feigned promise that meant nothing except that she liked to flirt.
I scaled the load with the two of them watching and it took longer because I measured carefully with fluster sweat running everywhere. I could hear her laugh, low and throaty, as she and Orie talked, but I couldn't hear what they said.
Feeling like an idiot, I added Becky Sooner's scale, my early estimate missing the total by over a thousand board feet. She dragged me back to the cab of her truck, hanging onto my arm. "Thanks Scott," she said from the cab of her black Ford, "see you again." She gave me a promising smile as she dropped the clutch and the Ford diesel snorted a column of black smoke. I watched until the black diesel disappeared around the log decks.
"Did I lie?" Orie said behind me.
"Nope," I agreed.
The afternoon ran a constant race of one load after another and Orie and I scaled furiously to keep ahead. Somewhere in the mid-afternoon I drew a crusty driver named Swede Tolson, a big blond haired log jockey who smoked plastic-tipped cigars and ate Copenhagen like candy. I don't remember ever seeing Swede when he wasn't smoking or chewing and most of the time it was both. He followed me around the load, enveloping me in second-hand Tiparillo smoke and the sweet smell of snuff.
"That sure looks like a thirty-inch'er," he'd say when I wrote twenty-eight.
Two logs later, in a try to get away from him, I stepped backward, forgetting that I stood over three feet from the ground on a narrow two by twelve. My stick and book went sailing and the ground came up to meet me hard. As I lay gasping for breath, Swede could only comment, hardly sympathetic, "You'll have to learn to watch your step if you're going to be a good scaler."
I picked myself up and went back to work, determined that Swede would never know how much it hurt. It took much teeth clenching and hard swallowing to get through the rest of Swedes load.
Whenever a break in the traffic allowed, Orie and I took turns totaling the loads on the Olivetti. I had an old Victor hand crank on my table that I avoided unless desperate. Most of us could add faster in our heads, a knack I lost quickly when speedy adding machines like the Olivetti came along. We were spending one of these periods, catching up, when Augustus Horne stepped through the funeral door.
"Hi, Gus, " Orie said.
"Orie," Horne replied. Horne stood as tall as me, but heavier and he filled the door frame impressively. "How's he doing?" He directed the question at Orie without acknowledging my presence.
"Just fine, Gus. He knows the rules. He'll work out fine."
They talked as if I wasn't in the room and it rankled me. Horne had no trouble doing that any time I saw him.
"I can do the job," I injected, "I don't need anyone to speak for me."
Horne turned to me. "You've got a long way to go to prove yourself around here. I suggest you keep that smart mouth in check until you have something of substance to say." Horne whirled and disappeared out the door before I could respond. Outside his truck engine roared and tire-thrown bark chips bounced off the scale house wall. I wasn't sure why I wanted to cross Horne; it was counterproductive I knew, but it felt good.
"It doesn't pay to piss him off." I could tell that Orie wanted bad to tell me to keep my mouth shut around Horne. "He's a hard man, but fair. There are a lot of guys here that owe their jobs to him."
"Like you...?" I said it and instantly regretted the words. I liked Orie; he'd made me feel welcome and pushed me through the throes of first day's fumbling without making me out to be an idiot. Right then, I felt like one. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded, Orie."
I was too late. "Yes, like me. He gave me a job when I needed one bad. He came down here and scaled when my wife took sick and I had to care for the kids. Anytime anyone on this crew needed help, Horne was there." Orie stuck his finger in my face and I knew I was about to catch hell. "You're a good scaler, Scott, and from what I've seen you'll go far. Horne can give you a boost up if you prove to him you're worth it. His word is solid with the big-shots in New York. Cross him, and he'll dump you as fast. I'd hate to see you become one of the bunch, so keep your damn mouth shut around Horne."
I raised my arms in surrender, chastised by Orie's venomous speech. The words hung long in my mind that perhaps I should watch Horne longer before crossing him off. Orie certainly felt respect for the man and I had come to value Orie's judgment in less than a day. He'd put a lot of emotion into the longest speech I was ever to hear him make.
"Okay," I said, "I'm sorry."
Orie wound down silently, beating on the keys of the Olivetti, adding scale as if he were mad at the machine. An hour passed before he said another word. I let him be, adding scale in my head and wondering about my new job. The duties outlined the same, a familiarity in the repetitiveness of the measuring and calculating functions that felt affable. Some of my co-workers I liked and others I could do without, yet something clawed at my soul, telling me that this location struck different.
Finally, Orie talked again. "Sometimes, I need a soap box."
"Forget it. I had it coming." Neither of us mentioned the incident again, yet I'd learned something about Orie. I pondered it and decided that if I ever went looking for a friend, I wouldn't have to go far.
By a quarter to seven we had all the loads totaled and the last truck gone. "I usually close at seven," Orie said. "That damn Rags will sometimes try to sneak in and plead with me to stay and scale him. I learned early that every time I did he'd pull the same stunt the next night. Now, he knows, if he's not here by seven, I don't scale him. He'll try with you, too."
"It doesn't matter to me," I said, "I don't have anywhere to go."
"Well, don't let him get into the habit."
As Orie predicted, a fender-flapping, chain rattling, faded green Mack with eight-foot bunks and rusty pipe cheaters roared into the landing at six-fifty-five. Brush and limb marks crisscrossing deeply oxidized paint and the doors held closed with rubber straps, the truck cab rattled a faded tune of dented metal and fractured glass. The drivers called him Rags, shortened from raggedy-ass trucker.
The brakes squealed when he stopped and an aging Detroit diesel coughed milk white smoke and belched its death throes between the ramps. I wasn't sure I should scale or bury it.
The driver, a lean wisp of a man stumbled out of the cab after minutes of fumbling with his rubber band door locks. Rags drove in a washed-thin pair of gunmetal cotton bibs worn over black wool pants and a torn flannel shirt that needed an oil change. His age was on hold somewhere between forty and sixty and his snarled gray hair fell from under a dented aluminum hard hat. He had given up shaving with any regularity, always, it seemed, wearing six days of salt and pepper beard.
Orie had told me, with sarcasm dripping from every word that Rags usually stumbled through the scale house door, bouncing from jamb to jamb, his speech colored by local white lightning. That Rags had a taste for moonshine rated as a gross understatement since his usual condition left him unsteady on his feet and mouthy. If he had weighed more than his one-forty, someone would long ago have cured his loosened tongue, but his slight stature saved him and allowed him to get away with outrageous performance.
I watched an intoxicated Rags slide out of the rusty Mack and he slapped a load card in my hand. His eyes whiskey wild and pupils tight as pinpoints, he staggered me with bootleg breath.
"Scale'er, boy," he said, "there's a load on her."
In the woods, the drivers had a strict rotation on who was first under the heel boom loader each morning. The first two or three trucks got the best logs and were able to make three rounds during the day. The unwritten code demanded that if you missed your turn, you went to the end of the line. Rags never made his first turn and usually came in dead last with his one load per day. He'd start sipping from the mayonnaise jar while waiting his turn, his old Mack shaking at idle and country music blaring on his radio. Lubricated with illegal whiskey, he'd roar into the Sutton's Landing carrying fifty or sixty scab logs and running without safety binders on.
"Pull it out and put your binders on," I said, knowing Horne would have my ass if I let him set at the ramps without two mandatory cables and chain tighteners on the load. "Do it now!"
"Aw, come on, Sonny, can't you just scale it and I'll remember next time?"
"Go on home and sleep it off, Rags," Orie said. "We're closed for the night. We'll get you in the morning, when you've got your safeties on."
"Hell, Orie, come on, I've got first round tomorrow. If I can't get unloaded tonight, I'll miss it."
"If you'd lay off Jasper's rot-gut, you'd get here soon enough to get scaled." There wasn't an ounce of sympathy in Orie's voice.
"I ain't had but a swig or two."
"Sure. I'm not going to argue, Rags. We'll do it tomorrow."
"You move that damn truck right now and put on those safety binders and I'll scale you tonight. Argue one word and it might be next week before it gets scaled, your choice." I used my toughest voice to cover up my tender age. Orie gave me a look that should have silenced me in an instant. To this day, I can't figure what possessed me to chime in with a sucker offer, but I did. He was older than me by twice, a pitiful man, living day to day driving a bedraggled old truck and slowly killing himself with booze.
"You go home, Orie. I'll scale him."
Orie's eyes roamed the sky and he shook his head, sure I'd lost my mind. "Your funeral, I guarantee you'll regret it. See you in the morning." He gathered his scale books and loaded the bunch in his company truck. By the time he drove away Rags had snaked the old Mack out of the ramp area and was busily putting on his binders. I watched him struggle over a half hour with what should have taken fifteen minutes. He hung like a chimp from a forty inch pipe cheater until I walked over and helped him bring the stubborn chain tightener home. "Thanks," he grunted, winded from exertion and polluting the air with gasps of moonshine and Skoal.
"Pull over and I'll scale you."
"Thanks, kid," he said, "I appreciate it." He moved carefully, concentrating on every step, trying to cover his unsteadiness as he climbed back in his sorry truck. Somehow, he maneuvered it back into position between the ramps.
There were sixty-eight logs, all small with little defect and the load scaled easily, but it passed eight before I completed the measuring and dropped to ground. Rags followed me into the scale shack carrying a mason jar. The contents looked like water, but I suspected different.
As the summer passed I learned that illegal bond ranked high with the natives, though no one would admit to where it came from or who made it. Rags made himself at home while I sat at the Olivetti and when I was done, he shoved a coffee mug of the stuff under my nose.
"Better have a drink, son," he said, adopting me right off.
I'll admit I was curious. It looked like vodka, sparkling clear so I could see the coffee stains in the bottom of the cup. I tried a sip and forgot not to breathe.
"Jesus," I gasped, coughing and trying to regain my composure. It looked innocent enough, but the fumes set my lungs on fire and it burned all the way down. I remembered why I had always been a confirmed beer drinker.
"It takes a little practice," Rags said.
My second try fared better and soon I was a pro. I begged off a second mug and the old man staggered out after pumping my hand and telling me how much he appreciated my staying late.
After he left, I locked the shack and walked back across the landing carrying my scale books. The crane's diesel sat silent, resting after twelve long hours. A Great Northern engine pulled log-loaded flatcars onto the mainline, reading them for the fifty mile trip down river to the sawmill at Libby. I walked though a cushion of ground bark and the breeze kissed the back of my neck. Rags' moonshine rolled around in my veins and I could think about her without hearing tearing metal. She walked beside me, smiling, and I knew I would sleep that night.
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