Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  Rich nodded and took up his gear, rain beaded on the chainsaw’s casing. The Feeley kid shouldered the heavy coil of steel-cored rope without complaint.

  “I knew your dad,” Rich said as they headed up the steep slope. “He was a good man.” The kid’s denims were stiff with store creases. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Your mom know you’re here?”

  “She knows.”

  “She doesn’t like it?” Rich guessed.

  The kid shrugged. Tom Feeley had been quiet too. Tom had started out at the mill, a good way to go broke or lose a finger, and headed into the woods first chance he’d got. Hell of a hard worker, he’d busted his ass setting chokers, done everything right. But chains snap. His wife had been pregnant at the funeral—must have been this kid in her belly.

  “This your first logging job?” Rich asked, stopping at the base of a three-hundred-footer.

  The kid nodded.

  “Well, you picked a good place to start. These big pumpkins are the big paydays.” Rich surveyed the giant trees. “Solid heartwood, no knots, just clear-all-heart—highest-grade redwood God ever made.” Rich dropped his gear. The kid lowered the rope. His shoulder would be sore later. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  They hiked up to Damnation Spring. Rich crouched at the water’s edge, rinsed his hands, then cupped them, drank. “Those are some good-looking denims.” Rich wiped his mouth, took the old lockback off his belt, popped the knife open and held it out, handle first. “Time to lose the cuffs. Stag off six inches.”

  “They’re new,” the kid objected.

  “I see that.” Rich stood up. “So, here’s how this goes. First, we cut a road—can’t get the equipment in or the timber out without a road. The Cats handle that—D8s, big piece of machinery. You catch the bottom of those fancy denims and don’t get out of the way fast enough, one’ll drag you under, roll you flat as a rug. Mash you into hamburger. Or say you trip trying to run clear, and pow: a log hammers you into the ground like a nail into sand. I seen it happen. Anything that can snag: hair, shoelaces, work pants”—Rich lifted his chin at the kid’s denims—“can get you killed.”

  The kid took the knife, weighed it.

  “Sharp enough to shave with,” Rich said, seeing the idea of mutilating the new denims bothered him. “Now. Catskinners—guys driving Cat—cut road”—Rich traced switchbacks with his finger—“and clear out a flat spot up top, a landing for the yarder. Lew”—Rich looked around—“guy with the belly who was driving the crummy. He’s the yarder operator. The yarder’s a big diesel engine on skis. It’s got a couple of big drums that spin around and reel the mainline cable in to pull logs up the hill. Like fishing, except that line’s three and a half inches thick and the fish weigh a couple tons each. You follow?”

  The kid nodded.

  “This is a high-lead show. That means we use a spar tree, that big one, where we dumped the gear, as a center pole, like the mast on a ship. Spar’s got to withstand a lot of weight. Our faller will drop a ring of trees around our spar. Once that’s done, I climb up, trim off her branches, and cut her top off. Then we haul the blocks—big pulleys—up the spar and rig the cable system that maneuvers the logs. We’ll tie guylines to that ring of stumps, use them as anchors, to take the pressure off, keep the spar tree from buckling.”

  The kid looked up, as though the work might be going on over his head.

  “Since this is old-growth, there’s not too much brush—shade keeps it down. But Sanderson will send a chopper out anyway. Chopper sprays places trucks can’t. Forest Service hoses their timberlands once in March or April, then calls it good, but Sanderson sprays all season, wherever we’re working. Spray kills the weeds and the trash trees—broadleaf plants—everything that gets in our way. It’s a growth hormone—hops them up so they grow so fast they die.” Rich batted at the chest-high ferns. “Now, redwood’s soft. If she falls wrong, she’ll bust. So the Cats push all the dead stuff into a pile at her base, and then piles every ten feet or so to give her some cushion—that’s what we call a fall bed. It’s an art, falling a tree this size. There aren’t a lot of guys left can do it the way Pete can.”

  “Pete Peterson?” the kid asked, Pete’s name a legend, up and down the North Coast.

  “Down there in the chaps, the one with the big crooked nose. Pete nails his springboards into a big pumpkin and then he and the guy helping him climb up—six, eight feet off the ground. They cut the face on the side they want her to fall, like this.” Rich held his hands together at a forty-five-degree angle, to show the shape of the undercut. “They pull out the mouthpiece—we’re talking a slice twelve feet long—drive wedges in, and go around the other side and back her up, just a straight backcut. Then they run like hell.”

  Rich raised his voice a notch to be heard over the Cats below.

  “Once she’s down, Lyle comes along, saws off her branches, then bucks her to truck lengths. Slices up a three-hundred-footer just like he’s cutting a carrot. Now, here’s where you come in.”

  The kid straightened up.

  “You and Eugene drag the choker chains around the logs—that means digging or setting dynamite so you can reach around under—and watch it, those logs can roll. You pull those chains tight enough to choke a man; that’s why it’s called setting chokers. You snug ’em and lock ’em.” Rich pinched the fingers of one hand together into a choker knob and used the other to cap it like a bell. “Then you signal.” Rich whistled through his teeth: three short—pause—two short. “Lew reels the line in, drags those logs up to be loaded. Got it?”

  The kid nodded, though he looked uncertain.

  “Eugene’s been setting chokers for a decade and he’s still got two arms and two legs. You can learn a lot from him. When I first met him, he was just a log-truck mechanic lying flat on his back fixing brake lines, but he smelled the real money. It smelled like the woods. Now look at him.”

  Rich had felt for Eugene back then—red hair already thinning, a wife and kid at home, young enough to be Rich’s own son. He was from Oregon, logging country, small and strong, monkey arms long to his knees—arms made for setting chokers—but he still wore his dog tags, to show how tough he was. Rich knew Don would never hire a guy like that. So, for the first and only time in his life, Rich had climbed the stairs to the crow’s nest above the mill floor where Virgil Sanderson kept watch over the saws, redwood boards dropping onto the conveyer belt red as raw meat. Virgil sat with a ledger spread out in front of him, white hair tinted yellow by nicotine, cloud of cigarette smoke surrounding him like his own personal fog. Rich had worked for Virgil Sanderson his whole life, but he’d never had a conversation with him.

  Gundersen. Virgil had acknowledged him, as though he might be his father or his grandfather, any one of a long line of Gundersens.

  Don never said a word about it, but every time Eugene did something stupid, Don looked to Rich: Eugene was his responsibility. Small price to pay, in the end. It wasn’t long after Rich got Eugene hired on that Eugene’s wife brought her sister to the company bonfire: the quiet girl from the front office—Colleen. Flames reflected in the lenses of her thick glasses, and, without warning, the train of Rich’s life had lurched onto a set of tracks he hadn’t known existed.

  “What’s Don do?” the kid asked.

  “Don? Don’s the boss, but we’re a small operation, so he’s also the hooktender. Hooker tells you what logs to choke in what order. Don’s a fair guy, but he ever catches you without a hard hat, he’ll fire your ass. Couple things to remember: every week, the scaler comes by to measure and mark our cut. We get paid by the foot and the grade, about a penny a board foot. A big pumpkin like these here pays five or six grand, minus breakage. The more we cut, the more we make. It shakes down different, based on your job, but bottom line, you slow the show down, you’re costing us all money. Got it? Logging’s a good living, but remember: these big pumpkins can kill you. Whatever’s eating you, you leave it on the crummy.
Pay attention. You let your mind wander, it can cost you your life, or somebody else’s.”

  The kid dropped his eyes. Son of a killed logger, he still needed to be told.

  “Look, my dad died in the woods too,” Rich confided. “And my granddad before him. Doesn’t matter how careful you are, a redwood’s a monster. We’ve got to respect that. Don’t be looking at the ground. Look up. A slacked cable, a widowmaker falling from the sky—even a branch four, five inches in diameter can break your neck if she falls from three hundred feet. Watch the wind.” Rich tapped his ear. “Listen.”

  “What are those for?” the kid asked, nodding at the fistful of orange ribbons shoved into Rich’s pocket. Rich had forgotten them.

  “We need to stake off the creek. Fifty feet, on both sides.”

  “Why?” the kid asked.

  “Good goddamn question. It’s what they call a ‘ri-par-i-anne corridor.’ ”

  What the hell kind of five-dollar word is that? Eugene had asked the first time they heard it. If you mean creek, say creek.

  “We have to leave a buffer zone. When I was your age, we filled streams that got in our way, but now there’s rules. Makes things a little more complicated. Sanderson had a hell of a time getting these harvest plans through.”

  “How come?” the kid asked, suddenly more interested.

  “Damnation Creek is a spawning creek. Salmon. Mud runs off, clouds the water, water catches more sun and warms up. Coho like it cool. I don’t know.” Rich sighed. “I just do what they tell me…”

  “Quentin,” the kid offered, seeing Rich grasp for the name.

  “Any more questions, Quentin?” Rich handed him his share of the ribbons.

  “I don’t got a tape measure.”

  “Just pace it off.”

  Rich cut up around the top of the spring to the far side of the creek, tied a ribbon to a rhododendron, then loped twenty yards downhill and tied another. His throat was sore from talking. He got back down to the road first.

  “You stag off those denims, when you’re done,” Rich called up, “then go get set with Eugene.”

  * * *

  Rich got his climbing gear on, fed the steel-cored rope around the base of his spar tree, set his spurs to bark, pulled the rope taut, and started walking up the trunk. The climbing got easier as he went, the spar’s diameter narrowing from eighteen at the butt, but the breathing sure as hell didn’t. His heart double-timed. Used to haul ass up a three-hundred-footer, limb and top her in under an hour, but these days he was lucky to finish in two. He dug in his spurs, leaned back into the rope to give his arms a rest, and glanced up to gauge his altitude. First trick Lark ever taught him: look up.

  What’s worse than a dumb, scared sonofabitch?

  A dumb sonofabitch.

  He looked down at the kid below, sitting on a rock, sawing at his denims.

  The spar dripped with condensation, Rich’s clothes already wet where they’d rubbed. No staying dry in the woods. Paydays, guys used to strip buck naked in the mill lot to change after work, then hightail it to the old joyhouse above the Beehive, but those days were gone. The One and Only Tavern had become truly the Only—the Cutthroat and the Steelhead both boarded up. At the rate they’d turned timber into park, even the whores had packed up and left. Probably have to drive clear over the Oregon line just to catch a decent case of crabs.

  The lightweight Husqvarna tugged at his belt, chainsaw swinging on her rope, tuned up. He was looking forward to the first cut: hot knife through butter. He flipped the rope up again, and like he’d pulled a cord, the lunch buzzer sounded, so loud Colleen heard it three ridges away. Almost a decade since Virgil had kicked the bucket and Merle sold out to the big-city dicks who switched them to the electric buzzer, but Rich still missed the old steam whistle. He looked up: the big tree’s armpits overgrown with fern, lettuce-leaf lungwort, orange lichen.

  Different forest up there, Lark said.

  The lunch buzzer sounded again. Ten thirty a.m. on the dot, Don’s regulation lunchtime thirty. Sonofabitch should have been a schoolteacher. Rich sighed. Just got situated, but now wasn’t the time to piss Don off—short fuse on a long stick of dynamite. Getting into the grove had been hell from the start. First the longhairs barricading the road, then the timber harvest plans stalling—some environmental bullshit with the state forestry board. Merle had greased some hands and finally gotten the plans approved, but Don took that shit personal.

  Rich looked off at 24-7 Ridge. He needed Sanderson to run roads down into the lower grove and clear those big pumpkins out, clear the way for him to harvest the 24-7. A need that itched worse by the day. But Don would sniff him out in a city minute if he started asking questions. He hadn’t even told Colleen yet.

  Rich lowered himself back to the ground and shed his belt and spurs. The buzz of killed saws rang in his ears. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be. Sanderson had given out earplugs at the company picnic this year, earplugs when all that kept you from getting clubbed by a falling widowmaker or rolling-pinned by a runaway log was your damn ears. Back in the old days they got ball caps, aprons for the wives. Arlette picked that crap out, walked around collecting thank-yous, everybody trying to stay on Merle’s good side. Now they’d been downgraded to earplugs not much bigger than a couple of aspirin and Arlette hadn’t even shown up. Rich had tried them out, bucking firewood at the house—kept having to ask Colleen to speak up, figured he’d save what he had left—but the things were a pain in the ass to maneuver. Shoved one so far down his ear canal his head felt corked. Lucky he ever got the damn thing out.

  Spit pooled in his mouth as he walked. Piece of lemon loaf would really hit the spot. When Rich got down to the crummy, he found Eugene hassling the big-headed Sanderson kid.

  “Look at that asshole.” Pete snorted. “Doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together.”

  Rich wasn’t sure what pissed Pete off more: that the kid had leapfrogged straight to catskinner instead of putting in his time setting choker chains like everybody else, or that he was Merle’s blood. Rich hadn’t learned to read until the fifth grade, Pete already multiplying three-digit numbers in his head, but, at the end of the day, they were both the sons of loggers. A high school diploma wasn’t worth beans in the woods. They’d started out setting chokers together at fifteen, dragging cables thick as their forearms over giant logs, Klamath a timber kingdom and Merle its prince, away at private school.

  Eugene clapped the Sanderson boy on the back and a grin broke across the kid’s bovine face. Eugene had a way of shining a light on a person, making him feel important.

  “Want to suck Merle’s dick?” Pete asked. “Get in line.”

  Couldn’t blame Eugene for hedging his bets. Six kids to feed. At least he was dancing with the ones that brung him. Not like some guys, shacking up with the first gyppo outfit that came along.

  Pete shoved a plug of snus up under his lip and tucked the can into his back pocket, white ring worn into the denim. Best faller Sanderson ever had; Pete could drop a three-hundred-footer without putting a scratch on her. But even after he laid a big pumpkin down in a fall bed neat as a pen in a case—a skill maybe a hundred men in history had ever truly mastered—he looked dissatisfied. No wife, no kids, a habit of looking over your shoulder when he talked, such a skinflint he’d rigged his truck door with baling wire instead of shelling out to replace the rusted hinges, though he could fix radios, toasters, pop the guts out of a stopped clock, sort through the pieces, and set her back ticking in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. Rich had known him all his life and still felt the itch to look over his own shoulder at whatever it was Pete saw there.

  Pete spat a hot leash of juice in the direction of the Sanderson kid and dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. “Like to see the whore that shat out that piece of shit.”

  Hard to imagine Arlette putting up with it, if the boy really was Merle’s—but she had missed the company picnic, first time in recorded history, as though even
she wanted to keep her distance. Like to think it cost Merle some sleep, putting guys with twenty years under their belts out on their asses. But you didn’t ride out shitstorms the way Merle had by letting things eat you. He’d come alone to the Sunday fish fries since, slapping backs, hitching his pants up over his belly.

  Tom Feeley’s son appeared, denims stagged off unevenly, and handed Rich back his knife.

  “Hey, Rich!” Don called from up near the blowdown where three big pumpkins had gone over like dominos in the wind.

  Rich looked toward the crummy, where his lunch was, and sighed. By the time he reached him, Don stood at the edge of a root-ball crater deep enough to bury a truck in, the hole Rich had let Chub scramble down into.

  “That Feeley kid is so green I could plant him,” Rich said.

  Don didn’t lift his head, just stared down into the hole. Boulders the size of TVs were bound up in the wall of roots, torn free when the wind tipped her, busted her to toothpicks. Deadfall. That’s what happened when you let good timber get old: it went to waste. A human skull stared up from the bottom of the pit.

  “What do you think?” Don asked, short arms folded across his chest.

  Rich could hear the gears working in Don’s brain. Don had a temper, but he’d work twice as hard for half pay to keep his crew together. That was why, with the downsizing, Merle had kept him and fired Bill Henderson, the other crew boss.

  Wish I’d been a fly in that shitstorm, Eugene had said.

  They’d all heard Bill in there with Merle while they waited on their checks. Bill was a tough guy to like, greedy, rode his crews hard. He’d stormed out, calling Merle a cock-sucking sonofabitch. Rich could picture Merle leaning back at his desk then, arms crossed over that big pregnant gut, knowing he had Don by the short hairs.

  Look, Porter, you can boss both crews or I can let yours go and assign you to Bill’s. Your choice.

  Don so red-faced with rage he might bust a blood vessel.