“The plan is to rough them out with chainsaws just like the regular crews do it, then snake the logs down to the fence line like I said, using horses. From there, your folks should be able to pick up the logs over the fence and load them into the trailer. Rinse and repeat.”
“How many you think you can deliver? I can’t justify this for one or two logs, you know.”
I could tell Walter was thinking hard about the offer. I knew this was nothing like the normal way they sourced poles, but the man was in a bind. According to Nancy, the Co-Op was out of power poles and transformers. I said nothing about the transformers, pretending ignorance, but he wouldn’t be interested in the deal if a lack rendered the plan moot.
“I counted twenty pines down on my property that average fifty feet in length. We’ve cut up most of the smaller ones already. I think Wade said he had near that many, and Mr. Lovett hasn’t even done a tally yet, but he’s got more wooded land there than me and Wade combined. Wade also got permission from Byron Fitts to haul off any likely blowdown timber on his property as well. If you send out one of your guys to make the final call for sizes, I imagine we’ll have at least one trailer load, maybe two. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot when you put in thousand pole lots…”
“But we could sure use them right now. Lundy can steam them and clean them at his mill, but he’s in the same shape we’re in. Just how much were you thinking of charging, Mr. Hardin? I take it, you can speak for your neighbors, or you wouldn’t be here.”
That set us off on a few minutes of negotiations for the selected logs. I knew roughly what finished poles ran, and I also had some coaching from Wade on what to expect to get for these. Walter started by pointing out how the Co-Op was fronting a lot of capital for this venture, what with their crews and equipment being used. I countered, citing the fuel expenditure as the only real expense, since the Co-Op was unlikely to lay off workers at a time like this, and the equipment would otherwise just be sitting there in the garage.
We finally reached a sum we both claimed we could live with, which turned out to be about twenty percent more than I was expecting to receive. I truly wasn’t out to gouge the Co-Op, but Walter clearly warmed to the idea of getting some poles back into inventory and he had money to spend. When I asked, politely, for the payments to be made in cash, the man didn’t even blink before agreeing. Before the hurricane the banking restrictions were gradually easing, but this new mess had fouled up progress, at least in this area. If people wanted to buy something, they needed dollars to do it with. Humorously enough, about the only businesses still accepting checks were utilities, like the Co-Op, and no one in their right mind accepted credit cards anymore.
When we shook hands on the deal, Walter wanted to know when we could get started. I replied without hesitation.
“We can start tomorrow,” I said confidently. “If you can have the log trailer and the loader at our front gate in the morning, we’ll have the first dozen or so ready to go. I’ll stop by Wade’s on the way home and get him started as well. Might take a little bit over at Mr. Fitts’ place, but I’ll work with Wade to get them up and ready to go as well.”
“I’ll send Chad Evans over in the morning, and two days from now he’ll come back with the crew and I’ll call John Lundy to get his guys ready to receive a load tomorrow afternoon. Sound good?”
“Sounds like we’ve got a deal, Mr. Pine.”
“Call me Walt.”
“Then I’m Bryan, Walt. Pleasure doing business with you.”
“And you, Bryan.”
With the pleasantries out of the way, I headed back to the farm. We’d already been prepping for this, but there remained quite a bit of work to be done. Soggy, dangerous work, involving chainsaws and heavy loads, but we’d become numb to the elements after a while, and none of us shied away from hard work anymore.
CHAPTER TEN
We ended up cheating a little bit, using the tractor to haul some of the bigger logs over to the staging point we’d set up next to the front fence, but Bert and Ernie proved their worth, and their cost in oats, apples, and vet bills by snaking nearly thirty suitable logs out of the shattered grove over in the old Bonner place alone. Horses in harness might lack the high horsepower of a tractor, but they tend to be more nimble of foot and bog down less than a tractor. I’d purchased the set of harnesses from a gentleman up in Pennsylvania who still made them in the old style, after seeing an example on an internet site. Mike teased me about investing in buggy whips, but I figured I got the last laugh.
Working with Chad Evans, Walt’s go-to guy when it came to supplies like poles, cables, and a hundred other infrastructure items, meant that all but one of the logs he pre-selected in the field actually passed muster, and that rejection came after we discovered a pine beetle infestation when carving off the limbs. That one went from power pole to fireplace fodder mighty fast, and I didn’t complain.
“You really named them Bert and Ernie, or you just fucking with me?” Chad asked the first time I guided the massively muscled geldings into the clearing with the clean-cut log trailing behind.
This wasn’t my first time using the draft horses to tow a log around, of course, but it was still early days in the process, and we’d all learned a few lessons over the last few days. One important point was to reduce the drag on the log by spending a few extra minutes cleaning off all the bumps and irregularities. These protrusions tended to get stuck in the ground, preventing the almost frictionless glide of the wood across the rain-slick fields.
“That’s the way they came,” I admitted. “I tried changing it to something else, but they’ve become attached to those names. Won’t answer to anything else.”
Chad gave me a puzzled glance, but I just smiled and kept walking backward with the leads until I got the nearly eight-hundred-pound pine log just where I wanted to drop it.
“You think your horses talk to you?”
I let the silence stretch for a second before giving Chad a little chuckle.
“Uh, no,” I replied, trying to sound confused by the question. “Horses can’t talk, Mr. Evans,” I continued. “Unless you’re talking about Mr. Ed.”
Cocking an eye at me, Chad grunted out a short bark.
“You fucking with me, Mr. Hardin?”
“Oh, yeah,” I replied with a grin of my own before squelching over and unfastening the heavy, double-twisted chain. “I’m just fucking with you, Mr. Evans.”
“Please, call me Chad.”
“I’m Bryan.”
We’d been introduced earlier, but this was different. This was an old custom, rooted in the way working men related to one another after taking the other man’s measure.
We continued to ferry rough finished pine logs down through the fields as my crew of lumberjacks, consisting of Pat, Mike, and Charles, continued trimming out the limbs and hauling them off to the side. I’d offered to help, but of the group, only Billy was better with handling the horses and honestly, I was worried about him getting hurt. Guiding the horses seemed like an easy job, but I knew one slip and I would be under their hooves and then run over by the log being towed. I’d heard horses would try hard to avoid stepping on a human, or anything else they sensed might damage them, but there was still a risk. This was something I felt comfortable doing, and I also wanted to keep a close eye on the horses. “Say, did you grow up here?” I asked Chad as we started back, heading for the gate and back over to the Bonner place.
We’d considered setting up two pickup spots, but the culvert into the old driveway on the Bonner drive was near to collapsing and according to Chad, the shoulders along that stretch of the road were too steep to park either the log trailer or the one hauling the loader. Instead, we continued piling up the logs along the front fence line where Chad was confident the long arm of the loader could reach.
“Yeah, went through high school, then went off to Lamar for school. Had a little too much fun in the big city, so I moved back and got a job with the Co-Op.” Chad’s
voice was filled with more than a touch of self-deprecation as he politely described his failure at the halls of higher learning, and I laughed at the appropriate place. Though he was ten years my junior, Chad’s story reminded me of many of the guys I went to school with.
“Anyway, I ended up going nights to tech school, getting trained in diesel engine repair. I liked working on the dozers and such, but when this leadman position came up, I threw my name in the ring. What about you? Local boy?”
“Yeah, sort of. Well, grew up over in Jasper, went off for school. Met a good woman who kept me out of trouble. When I tried to come back, land prices were just stupid high. Found this spread for sale and started building it back up. My family helped out a lot, getting the new house and barns built.”
“You’re married? I heard that girl working out at the loading docks was living out here,” Chad blurted, then reddened as he realized what he’d said.
“No, I’m a widower, but Nancy’s only bunking here because Wade’s place is so overcrowded right now. Like a lot of folks, he had to take in a bunch of family who lost their homes with the storm.”
Chad looked down, then fell quiet for a few minutes, the silence only interrupted by the sound of the horses and our labored footsteps in the soaked ground. When he spoke again, Chad’s voice was full of regret.
“Sorry. I didn’t know about your wife, Bryan.” He paused again. “And that’s awful nice of you to give that girl a place to stay. I was out of line for sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.”
“Nonsense,” I replied, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “How in the heck were you supposed to know? I just worry any rumors might give Nancy a hard time finding a good man is all.”
Our conversation was interrupted by Nikki calling over the radio.
“Bryan, I need you to come back to the house. Over.”
“Something wrong?” I demanded, a spike of worry running through me as I gripped the plastic of the radio.
“No, well, yeah, but nothing burning down or blowing up,” Nikki replied, her voice distracted. “The sink in the kitchen is backing up, and so is the one in the downstairs bathroom.”
I gave a sigh of relief, then keyed the radio again.
“Understand,” I replied. “I’ll head over. Can you see if Billy is free? I guess he’s going to get some logging experience on his resume after all.”
“I’ll head on back to the camp,” Chad volunteered, “and pass the word. Is Billy,” he paused, “is that Sally’s boy?”
“Yep, and a smooth hand with the horses. He probably should have been doing this from the beginning. I just didn’t want to see him getting himself hurt.”
“I can see that,” Chad replied. “Plus, you just wanted some time to talk to your horses.”
We both laughed at that comment and parted with a handshake.
Back at the stables, I stripped the horses of their collars and harness, then gave them a bit of feed while using an old feed sack to give each one a vigorous rubdown. The horses appreciated the treatment, or so I interpreted from their non-verbal communications. Nope, still not talking back to me.
“The boys look good, Mr. Hardin,” Billy observed, stepping into the covered area of the corral where I was tending to Bert and Ernie. I’d already given up on having Billy call me Bryan, so I just let it go.
“They’ve been working hard, so they deserve a little coddling,” I replied, stepping back from where I’d been currying Bert’s mane. “I hate to send them back out in the rain, and you with them, but we still have more logs to haul down to the fence line. Mike will help you get the chains set up, and Mr. Evans will direct you where to unhook them.”
Billy nodded, his smile growing at the thought of getting to do some real work today. And with the horses, too.
“I’ll do a good job, Mr. Hardin,” Billy replied enthusiastically.
Billy, of course, turned out to be better at the job than I was. He brought younger legs, and a better hand with the horses. He took to the job like a duck to water. With Chad along to approve of the logs being used, the whole process ran smoothly for the rest of the day. The final tally was thirty-seven logs just from the two adjacent parcels. Most of that ended up coming from the extensive woodlot over on the Bonner property.
I, on the other hand, proved once again unequal to the task. Neither the snake nor the use of biodegradable drain cleaner worked, and I was reduced to calling Wade for his advice.
“I think your drainfield discharge is probably blocked,” Wade said as soon as I started to describe the problem. Turns out, it was just flooded. I should have seen this coming with all the rain, but other events had claimed my attention first.
We had set up the septic and wastewater system with a very robust design, including a 2,500 gallon commercial tank and a massive leach field for the blackwater system. Fortunately, the toilets weren’t overflowing yet, but the graywater system, including the showers and washing machines, were not draining properly.
By sticking with biodegradable soaps and the like, our graywater flow, which consisted of everything but the toilets, had been fairly easy to manage as the gravity flow did most of the work. Now though, with the soil already supersaturated, I discovered the graywater system needed some adjustments.
“What do you think?” I asked Mike.
“I’ll break out the backhoe tomorrow,” was his only response, but his tone said volumes. And not just that he didn’t like playing at plumber. Mike knew we were losing ground here, but the normalcy bias meant most people weren’t getting it.
Whatever miracle of engineering Mike could perform would not be undertaken until tomorrow. In the meantime, we would make do with wet rags to clean up, and no laundry service. With the shower drains backing up and the washers off-line, our lives on the farm just took a step back into the 1800s. At least we had the commercial electric restored, but we all knew how fragile that commodity could be.
Slowly but surely, the decline advanced in our little part of the world, and the incremental nature of the changes reminded me of the frog in the stew pot. The frog can hop out of the pot at any time, but the chef knows to raise the temperature a few degrees at a time. The frog never notices until the water starts to boil, and by then it is too late.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The next day turned out to be a bit of a mess, as the farm folk ended up splitting our focus for several different tasks. Some planned, and others coming from out of the blue.
While the work crew from the Co-Op worked to get the logs loaded from our collection by the fence, I ended up taking Billy, Pat, and Charles with me to play lumberjack at the Lovetts, while Wade and his brothers did the same for Mr. Fitts. Wade was disappointed in the eight logs he had to send off to the mill, having gotten most of his downed trees processed before I’d mentioned my idea to him. He would make up for it with whatever deal he struck with Mr. Fitts for disposing of the trees on his property, much like I’d done with Earl Lovett.
Since Mr. Lovett had two teams of horses he thought would work well moving the logs, we left that part of the program up to him and focused on limbing out and trimming the trees we thought would be acceptable to Chad Evans and the Co-Op. Mike, much to his disgust, was stuck trying to sort out the septic issues with Nikki acting as his gopher. At least Mike managed to troubleshoot our problem, which he deduced was a burned-out sprayer pump. We’d tried to go cheaper on the pump and lower power consumption, but my brother thought he had a solution using a similarly-sized pump but with a lower, slower cyclical rate. We destroyed the old one trying to get peak performance while all we ended up doing was testing the thing to destruction. Slower and steadier seemed to be the way to go, and time would tell if Mike had it right. Plus, the old pump had been a huge energy hog.
Sally was appointed as our observer for the loading crew, and Marta and Dorothy were both back at work at the hospital, which left Mary and Beatrice riding herd on the young’uns. When Beatrice half-jokingly objected to why Sally was picke
d to watch over the logging crew, Sally responded with what most thought was a humorous response of her own.
“I’m there to shoot them if they get out of line,” she’d said blandly.
Several people laughed, but a sharp-eyed observer might have noticed that Sally wasn’t one of them. Neither were the rest of what I called our first team. Those were the ones I knew could take a life and not hesitate at the risk of their families. That included Mike and myself, and I saw Nikki simply gave Sally an appraising glance. After dispatching her would-be assailants in a botched carjacking, and not dissolving into a puddle of useless tears after, we now knew Nikki belonged in the first team category.
Out in the rain, we found that most of the likely usable trees at the Lovett horse farm were located towards the back of the property. Mr. Lovett left a couple of acres of mixed oaks and pines growing in to act as shade and shelter for the horses. Lovett Horse Farms raised a couple of different, distinct breeds, but I knew from our earlier conversations, his Percherons would be the ones doing the pulling.
We set up a small camp at the edge of the field of destruction. Using what we could carry in our ATVs or haul on their trailers, this amounted to little more than an awning, a pair of folding camp chairs and a five-gallon water jug, and proceeded to measure and then strip the trees we thought met the inspector’s standards.
Though Mr. Lovett had lost dozens of trees in the five acre plot of land, Pat and his tape measure only identified twelve trees that were the minimum height and diameter for processing. Most of the others either came out too short, but I found a mostly straight line of trees that had been sheered in half nearly ten feet off the ground. Charles looked at the path and whistled.
“Dang, that must have been from a tornado, but look how narrow,” the big man observed, and I could only nod in agreement. I swallowed a touch of bile as I contemplated such a force of nature impacting our house. Reinforced or not, the building might have suffered catastrophic failure when hit with that kind of swirling wind.
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 2 | Storm Warning Page 8