The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  So I started graduate school that autumn, and it was tough and not made any easier by the thought of spending all next summer on the end of a saw opposite this direct descendant of a Scotch son of a bitch.

  But finally it was late June and there he was, sitting on a log across from me and looking as near like a million dollars as a lumberjack can look. He was dressed all in wool—in a rich Black Watch plaid shirt, gray, short-legged stag pants, and a beautiful new pair of logging boots with an inch or so of white sock showing at the top. The lumberjack and the cowboy followed many of the same basic economic and ecological patterns. They achieved a balance if they were broke at the end of the year. If they were lucky and hadn’t been sick or anything like that, they had made enough to get drunk three or four times and to buy their clothes. Their clothes were very expensive; they claimed they were robbed up and down the line and probably they were, but clothes that would stand their work and the weather had to be something special. Central to both the lumberjack’s and the cowboy’s outfit were the boots, which took several months of savings.

  The pair that Jim had on were White Loggers made, as I remember, by a company in Spokane that kept your name and measurements. It was a great shoe, but there were others and they were great, too—they had to be. The Bass, the Bergman, and the Chippewa were all made in different parts of the country, but in the Northwest most of the jacks I remember wore the Spokane shoe.

  As the cowboy boot was made all ways for riding horses and working steers, the logger’s boot was made for working on and around logs. Jim’s pair had a six-inch top, but there were models with much higher tops—Jim happened to belong to the school that wanted their ankles supported but no tie on their legs. The toe was capless and made soft and somewhat waterproof with neat’s-foot oil. The shoe was shaped to walk or “ride” logs. It had a high instep to fit the log, and with a high instep went a high heel, not nearly so high as a cowboy’s and much sturdier because these were walking shoes; in fact, very fine walking shoes—the somewhat high heel threw you slightly forward of your normal stance and made you feel you were being helped ahead. Actually, this feeling was their trademark.

  Jim was sitting with his right leg rocking on his left knee, and he gestured a good deal with his foot, raking the log I was sitting on for emphasis and leaving behind a gash in its side. The soles of these loggers’ boots looked like World War I, with trenches and barbwire highly planned—everything planned, in this case, for riding logs and walking. Central to the grand design were the caulks, or “corks” as the jacks called them; they were long and sharp enough to hold to a heavily barked log or, tougher still, to one that was dead and had no bark on it. But of course caulks would have ripped out at the edges of a shoe and made you stumble and trip at the toes, so the design started with a row of blunt, sturdy hobnails around the edges and maybe four or five rows of them at the toes. Then inside came the battlefield of caulks, the real barbwire, with two rows of caulks coming down each side of the sole and one row on each side continuing into the instep to hold you when you jumped crosswise on a log. Actually, it was a beautiful if somewhat primitive design and had many uses—for instance, when a couple of jacks got into a fight and one went down the other was almost sure to kick and rake him with his boots. This treatment was known as “giving him the leather” and, when a jack got this treatment, he was out of business for a long time and was never very pretty again.

  Rev. John Norman Maclean and Clara (Davidson) Maclean with their sons, Norman (left) and Paul, about 1911.

  Norman Fitzroy Maclean in an undated studio portrait from his college years. Maclean graduated from Dartmouth College in 1924.

  Paul Maclean in a photograph by Norman Maclean, late 1930s. Norman was an enthusiastic amateur photographer.

  Paul Maclean, Jessie Burns Maclean, and Norman Maclean at Seeley Lake, Montana, 1932.

  Rev. John Norman Maclean, no date. Photograph by Norman Maclean.

  Paul Maclean at Seeley Lake, Montana, in 1937, the year before he was murdered in a Chicago alley. Photograph by Norman Maclean.

  Jessie Burns Maclean, 1934. Photograph by Norman Maclean.

  Norman Maclean (right) with George Croonenberghs at Diana Lake, Montana, 1949. Croonenberghs tied flies for Norman and Paul, and served as fishing instructor and period adviser for the 1992 movie A River Runs through It.

  Body retrieval in Mann Gulch, Montana, August 6, 1949. The Mann Gulch fire haunted Maclean until his death and was the subject of his 1992 book, Young Men and Fire. Photograph by Dick Wilson.

  Robert Utley at the Custer Battlefield Monument, 1950. Courtesy of Robert Utley.

  Marie Borroff in an undated photograph. Courtesy of Marie Borroff.

  Nick Lyons at Hunter College, 1980. Courtesy of Nick Lyons.

  Norman Maclean in the cabin at Seeley Lake, about 1960.

  Maclean teaching English 237, his popular course on Shakespeare, at the University of Chicago, January 1970. Photograph by Leslie Strauss Travis.

  Seventh Cavalry grave markers at Custer Battlefield, photographed by Norman Maclean in August 1933.

  One of the original markers in Mann Gulch, Montana, for the United States Forest Service Smokejumpers who perished there on August 5, 1949. Photograph by Alan Thomas, 1992.

  Norman Maclean, Chicago, 1975. Photograph by Joel Snyder.

  Every time Jim kicked and raked the log beside me for emphasis I wiped small pieces of bark off my face.

  In this brief interlude in our relations it seemed to me that his face had grown a great deal since I first knew him last year. From last year I remembered big frame, big head, small face, tight like a fist; I even wondered at times if it wasn’t his best punch. But sitting here relaxed and telling me about pimping and spraying bark on my face, he looked all big, his nose too and eyes, and he looked handsome and clearly he liked pimping—at least for four or five months of the year—and he especially liked being bouncer in his own establishment, but even that, he said, got boring. It was good to be out in the woods again, he said, and it was good to see me—he also said that; and it was good to be back to work—he said that several times.

  Most of this took place in the first three or four days. We started in easy, each one admitting to the other that he was soft from the winter, and, besides, Jim hadn’t finished giving me this course on pimping. Pimping is a little more complicated than the innocent bystander might think. Besides selecting a whore (big as well as southern, i.e., “poetical”) and keeping her happy (taking her to the Bijou Theater in the afternoons) and hustling (rounding up all the Swedes and Finns and French Canadians you had known in the woods), you also had to be your own bootlegger (it still being Prohibition) and your own police fixer (it being then as always) and your own bouncer (which introduced a kind of sporting element into the game). But after a few days of resting every hour we had pretty well covered the subject, and still nobody seemed interested in bringing up socialism.

  I suppose that an early stage in coming to hate someone is just running out of things to talk about. I thought then it didn’t make a damn bit of difference to me that he liked his whores big as well as southern. Besides, we were getting in shape a little. We started skipping the rest periods and took only half an hour at lunch and at lunch we sharpened our axes on our Carborundum stones. Slowly we became silent, and silence itself is an enemy to friendship; when we came back to camp each went his own way, and within a week we weren’t speaking to each other. Well, this in itself needn’t have been ominous. Lots of teams of sawyers work in silence because that is pretty much the kind of guys they are and of course because no one can talk and at the same time turn out thousands of board feet. Some teams of sawyers even hate each other and yet work together year after year, something like the old New York Celtic basketball team, knowing the other guy’s moves without troubling to look. But our silence was different. It didn’t have much to do with efficiency and big production. When he broke the silence to ask me if I would like to change from a six- to a se
ven-foot saw, I knew I was sawing for survival. A six-foot blade was plenty long enough for the stuff we were sawing, and the extra foot would have been only that much more for me to pull.

  It was getting hot and I was half-sick when I came back to camp at the end of the day. I would dig into my duffel bag and get clean underwear and clean white socks and a bar of soap and go to the creek. Afterwards, I would sit on the bank until I was dry. Then I would feel better. It was a rule I had learned my first year working in the Forest Service—when exhausted and feeling sorry for yourself, at least change socks. On weekends I spent a lot of time washing my clothes. I washed them carefully and I expected them to be white, not gray, when they had dried on the brush. At first, then, I relied on small, home remedies such as cleanliness.

  I had a period, too, when I leaned on proverbs, and tried to pass the blame back on myself, with some justification. All winter I had had a fair notion that something like this would happen. Now I would try to be philosophical by saying to myself, “Well, pal, if you fool around with the bull, you have to expect the horn.”

  But, when you are gored, there is not much comfort in proverbs.

  Gradually, though, I began to fade out of my own picture of myself and what was happening and it was he who controlled my thoughts. In these dreams, some of which I had during the day, I was always pulling a saw and he was always at the other end of it getting bigger and bigger but his face getting smaller and smaller—and closer—until finally it must have come through the cut in the log, and with no log between us now, it threatened to continue on down the saw until it ran into me. It sometimes came close enough so that I could see how it got smaller—by twisting and contracting itself around its nose—and somewhere along here in my dream I would wake up from the exertion of trying to back away from what I was dreaming about.

  In a later stage of my exhaustion, there was no dream—or sleep—just a constant awareness of being thirsty and of a succession of events of such a low biological order that normally they escaped notice. All night sighs succeeded grunts and grumblings of the guts, and about an hour after everyone was in bed and presumably asleep there were attempts at homosexuality, usually unsuccessful if the statistics I started to keep were at all representative. The bunkhouse would become almost silent. Suddenly somebody would jump up in his bed, punch another somebody, and mutter, “You filthy son of a bitch.” Then he would punch him four or five times more, fast, hard punches. The other somebody never punched back. Instead, trying to be silent, his grieved footsteps returned to bed. It was still early in the night, too early to start thinking about daybreak. You lay there quietly through the hours, feeling as if you had spent all the previous day drinking out of a galvanized pail—eventually, every thought of water tasted galvanized.

  After two or three nights of this you came to know you could not be whipped. Probably you could not win, but you could not be whipped.

  I’ll try not to get technical about logging, but I have to give you some idea of daylight reality and some notion of what was going on in the woods while I was trying to stay alive. Jim’s pace was set to kill me off—it would kill him eventually too, but first me. So the problem, broadly speaking, was how to throw him off this pace and not quite get caught doing it, because after working a week with this Jack Dempsey at the other end of the saw I knew I’d never have a chance if he took a punch at me. Yet I would have taken a punching from him before I would ever have asked him to go easier on the saw. You were no logger if you didn’t feel this way. The world of the woods and the working stiff was pretty much made of three things—working, fighting, and dames—and the complete lumberjack had to be handy at all of them. But if it came to the bitter choice, he could not remain a logger and be outworked. If I had ever asked for mercy on the saw I might as well have packed my duffel bag and started down the road.

  So I tried to throw Jim off pace even before we began a cut. Often, before beginning to saw, sawyers have to do a certain amount of “brushing out,” which means taking an ax and chopping bushes or small jack pines that would interfere with the sawing. I guess that by nature I did more of this than Jim, and now I did as much of it as I dared, and it burned hell out of him, especially since he had yelled at me about it early in the season when we were still speaking to each other. “Jesus,” he had said, “you’re no gyppo. Any time a guy’s not sawing he’s not making money. Nobody out here is paying you for trimming a garden.” He would walk up to a cut and if there was a small jack pine in the way he would bend it over and hold it with his foot while he sawed and he ripped through the huckleberry bushes. He didn’t give a damn if the bushes clogged his saw. He just pulled harder.

  As to the big thing, sawing, it is something beautiful when you are working rhythmically together—at times, you forget what you are doing and get lost in abstractions of motion and power. But when sawing isn’t rhythmical, even for a short time, it becomes a kind of mental illness—maybe even something more deeply disturbing than that. It is as if your heart isn’t working right. Jim, of course, had thrown us off basic rhythm when he started to saw me into the ground by making the stroke too fast and too long, even for himself. Most of the time I followed his stroke; I had to, but I would pick periods when I would not pull the saw to me at quite the speed or distance he was pulling it back to him. Just staying slightly off beat, not being quite so noticeable that he could yell but still letting him know what I was doing. To make sure he knew, I would suddenly go back to his stroke.

  I’ll mention just one more trick I invented with the hope of weakening Jim by frequent losses of adrenalin. Sawyers have many little but nevertheless almost sacred rules of work in order to function as a team, and every now and then I would almost break one of these but not quite. For instance, if you are making a cut in a fallen tree and it binds, or pinches, and you need a wedge to open the cut and free your saw and the wedge is on Jim’s side of the log, then you are not supposed to reach over the log and get the wedge and do the job. Among sawyers, no time is wasted doing Alphonse-Gaston acts; what is on your side is your job—that’s the rule. But every now and then I would reach over for his wedge, and when our noses almost bumped, we would freeze and glare. It was like a closeup in an early movie. Finally, I’d look somewhere else as if of all things I had never thought of the wedge, and you can be sure that, though I reached for it, I never got to it first and touched it.

  Most of the time I took a lot of comfort from the feeling that some of this was getting to him. Admittedly, there were times when I wondered if I weren’t making up a good part of this feeling just to comfort myself, but even then I kept doing things that in my mind were hostile acts. The other lumberjacks, though, helped to make me feel that I was real. They all acknowledged I was in a big fight, and quietly they encouraged me, probably with the hope they wouldn’t have to take him on themselves. One of them muttered to me as we started out in the morning, “Some day that son of a bitch go out in the woods, he no come back.” By which I assumed he meant I was to drop a tree on him and forget to yell, “Timber!” Actually, though, I had already thought of this.

  Another good objective sign was that he got in a big argument with the head cook, demanding pie for breakfast. It sounds crazy, for anybody who knows anything knows that the head cook runs the logging camp. He is, as the jacks say, “the guy with the golden testicles.” If he doesn’t like a jack because the jack has the bad table manners to talk at meal time, the cook goes to the woods foreman and the jack goes down the road. Just the same, Jim got all the men behind him and then put up his big argument and nobody went down the road and we had pie every morning for breakfast—two or three kinds—and nobody ever ate a piece, nobody, including Jim.

  Oddly, after Jim won this pie fight with the cook, things got a little better for me in the woods. We still didn’t speak to each other, but we did start sawing in rhythm.

  Then, one Sunday afternoon this woman rode into camp, and stopped to talk with the woods foreman and his wife. She was a big wo
man on a big horse and carried a pail. Nearly every one in camp knew her or of her—she was the wife of a rancher who owned one of the finest ranches in the valley. I had only met her but my family knew her family quite well, my father occasionally coming up the valley to preach to the especially congregated Presbyterians. Anyway, I thought I had better go over and speak to her and maybe do my father’s cause some good, but it was a mistake. She was still sitting on her big horse and I had talked to her for just a couple of minutes, when who shows up but Jim and without looking at me says he is my partner and “pal” and asks her about the pail. The woods foreman takes all our parts in reply. First, he answers for her and says she is out to pick huckleberries, and then he speaks as foreman and tells her we are sawyers and know the woods well, and then he replies to himself and speaks for us and assures her that Jim would be glad to show her where the huckleberries are, and it’s a cinch he was. In the camp, the men were making verbal bets where nothing changes hands that Jim laid her within two hours. One of the jacks said, “He’s as fast with dames as with logs.” By late afternoon she rode back into camp. She never stopped. She was hurried and at a distance looked white and didn’t have any huckleberries. She didn’t even have her empty pail. Who the hell knows what she told her husband?