“All the time,” the other man said right back. “An’ it still ain’t enough.” Both guffawed.
“Here’s to ya.” Shorty was now slurring his words.
“Down the hatch,” said the man who then took a turn. “Shorty, did I tell you the one about the Rocky Mountain oysters?” Before Shorty could say a word he was off to the races.
Tom was watching the people at the bar, relaxing as he listened.
“Had a buddy who told it to me after he got back from Mexico. Y’now, they love their bullfights down there. So, well, my friend was in a cantina sipping his sangria when he noticed a waiter serving up a dish at the next table that looked and smelled so good he asked the waiter what it was. The man in the white jacket told him it was a rare delicacy, deep fried bull testicles. Okay, my friend says, ‘Well, it looks so good I think I’ll have the same myself.’ ‘Sorry, señor,’ the waiter told him, ‘supplies are limited and we are out. But if you come back the day after tomorrow, after the next bullfight, I’ll be happy to save some for you. Por seguro.’ Well, two days later my buddy went back and placed his order. Sure enough, the oysters were delicious, as described. But they were a lot smaller than the ones on the previous occasion. When he asked the waiter ‘Why is that?’ the man just shrugged and said, ‘So sorry, señor, but...how you say...algunas veces?...aah...some times...the bull he wins. Ha!” The guy howled so hard at his own joke he slipped off the barstool. But he climbed back up and clapped Shorty on the shoulder like a good old boy. Tom missed part of it, but got the punch line. But Shorty never did. He just stared at his drink.
That’s when the trouble started. A green-eyed stranger had stepped up behind Shorty, and now grabbed him by the shoulder, swung him around and got right in his face. Evidently the man had taken offense at the Timber Forever! logo stenciled on the back of Shorty’s T-shirt.
“I know what you do,” the stranger said in an outraged tone. “I’ve seen enough of your clearcuts to last me a life time.” It was too weird. The stranger began to lecture Shorty about leaving something for future generations; a mistake, as it turned out.
“Pshaw. What did future generations ever do for me?” Shorty said as he set down his drink and leaned back, elbows on the bar. The slur was gone now and his voice had an edge that Tom found alarming. Shorty’s body language was an explicit warning, one the other man would have been smart to heed. But apparently he failed to notice or just did not care.
Tom found it hard to believe his own eyes. Was this really happening?
The stranger put it right out there. He began to lecture Shorty about a place called Bowen Gulch that he said was “God’s country.” He and his friends were going to save it no matter what it took, come hell or high water.
“Happy to oblige,” said Shorty and slammed the man’s head against the bar. The body went limp and slithered to the floor. Shorty was on him fast, then, kicking and stomping until Tom and another man pulled him off, probably the only thing that saved the green-eyed stranger’s life.
As Tom attended to the fallen man, Shorty shambled out the side door to piss in the alley under the lonesome Colorado stars. He was back to slurring.
FOUR
Working in the woods was much the same from day to day. The logging routine hardly varied. But Tom had no issue with the monotony. He was having so much fun running his chainsaw that he could hardly wait to get out there and do it again. He was like a kid with a shiny new toy.
A summer high had established itself over the Rockies. The weather continued clear and mild, though in the first week of July the night temperatures dipped sharply, not unusual in the Rockies.
On the morning of the last hard frost of the season Tom was out of the sack before anyone else. He was already enjoying his first steaming cup of coffee when the logging camp began to stir.
Tom had the jump on the day. He ate in haste and was still working on the last of his eggs when he fired up his rig. As the engine warmed up he made small talk with Charlie McCoy, another early bird. Charlie was loading gear into the back of a truck. The older man yawned and rubbed a fist in one eye. “Brrr, it’s cold.”
“Want some coffee?” said Tom. “There’s more.”
“No thanks, I’m coffee’d out.” Charlie closed the tail-gate and looked at the sky. “Looks like another good one. Later, kid.”
Minutes later, Tom reached the logging site and parked his pickup just above the main landing, grabbed his gear, and started into the timber. He tramped down-slope through dense coniferous forest, then left the stand and started across a wide right-of-way clear cut, soon to be the site of a new reservoir. The stump field was heavy with frost and still deep in shadow.
Hardly noticing the devastation, Tom paused to savor the morning. High above, the mountain ridge was aflame, brightly backlit by sun. The kid shivered. No matter. The chill would pass in a hurry once the sun broke over the feathered rim.
The best time of day!
The footing was bad as he picked his way over the frozen ground, then, reentered the forest and followed the yellow flagging to his allotment.
Deep in the stand he stopped and unslung the two plastic jugs joined by a nylon cord from around his neck. One held oil for his saw chain, the other his gas mix. Setting the jugs aside, he took his Husky in hand, flipped the “ON” switch and set the choke. With one hand on the handle to steady it, he gave the rip-cord a smart yank. On the third pull the saw popped and sputtered. He released the choke and gave it another sharp pull. The saw was now primed and came snarling to life, fuming steel-blue smoke. Its high-pitched wail and the haunting echo, up and down the valley, shattered the peace of the mountain morning.
Tom was used to the racket but grimaced anyway. He looked around as he revved the saw. Here there was no “edge” to work. He was starting deep in the interior of the stand. His eye settled on his first tree of the day, a smooth-barked subalpine fir, about two feet in diameter. He eyed it up and down. Throttling the saw, he cleared the lower trunk of small branches with several quick vertical swipes.
Without further ado he moved into position and went to work. How he loved that first bite, the surging saw in his hands.
He worked easily, without strain, relaxed within himself as he guided the chain through the tree. The trick was to let the saw do the work. The teeth were razor sharp. The chainsaw was made to devour conifer and, tapped out to the max, the four cubic-inch two-cycle engine ate wood as fast as he could feed it. As the cut deepened large curlicue chips spewed out in a pile at his feet. The aromatic smell of pitch filled the air, sweet as a kiss, fresh as the morning air.
It doesn’t get any better than this.
The feeling of so much power at his command was indescribable. It was the best part of the work. The tree was putty in his hands.
A little more than halfway through the trunk he backed out and made his second cut, above and at a downward angle to the first. Then, he swung the bar out. As he did, a small wedge of wood blew out in a flurry of sawdust and shavings.
Deftly shifting position, he moved around the tree and started the back-cut, the coup de grace, slightly above the frontal cut. Halfway through, he paused and tapped a plastic wedge in behind the blade using a small axe as a hammer. The wedge was insurance. It would prevent the big fir from coming back on him.
He throttled the saw again to the max, every sense awake to the slight shudder he knew so well, the feel of tree beginning to give way. Gravity at work. The feeling was exquisite and when it came he pulled out fast and stepped back, out of harm’s way.
Only then did he look up.
The topple started slowly. From the look of the crown he knew it was a beauty. The fir was going to lay down exactly where he wanted it. Slowly it gathered momentum; then, came the thunderous crash with pine needles, bark, and branches flying.
A deafening KA-WOOOMPH momentarily drowned out his saw.
His head was a void as he trimmed the butt to even it up. He liked to stay in a thought free zone – a kind of no-mind
Zen headspace.
He worked his way horizontally up the trunk toward the crown, methodically lopping branches off the fallen giant. One last cut topped the bole. Done. His first tree of the day was now a log. He looked up, searching for the next one.
That one.
He strode toward another large fir and repeated the process. Before long, three neatly trimmed logs were on the ground ready to be winched up with choker cables and skidded to the loading dock. There, a bucker would measure and cut each one to length.
Three trees down and he had his opening, a small hole in the canopy where he could continue dropping timber without undue concern about hangers and wayward crowns.
By 9:00 a.m. he had peeled down to his t-shirt and was working up a sweat. But now the saw surged, the sound of a too-lean mix. The Husky was low on gas. He shut it off, but the high-pitched wail continued in his head. Layered over this, in the background, was the sing-song medley, rising and falling, of other chainsaws screaming in the distance, the sound of St. Clair’s loggers at work, a dozen men getting after it.
Tom looked up and noticed he had an audience. Dipstick and Shorty waved from across the way. The two had been watching him work. By now, this was almost commonplace. He waved back.
“Leave some for us, will ya’,” Dipstick shouted.
“Yeah, kid, don’t be so greedy,” said Shorty. Smiling, Tom joked with them and exchanged pleasantries, until the men finally picked up their saws and went back to work.
He leisurely attended to his Husky. First, he replenished the gas and bar oil, then, touched up the chain with a Swedish round file. From the draggy feel of the bar he knew he had dulled some teeth.
As he was filing he lost his concentration and his mind wandered. Suddenly, he was thinking about her. Tallie. A waking dream real as life. The previous winter, their torrid affair in the Florida outback had ended when he reluctantly put her on a bus to California. Months later, after his subsequent letters went unreturned, he had decided to expunge her forever from his thoughts; and had succeeded until her letter arrived via General Delivery. As much as he wanted to read it, he nonetheless had stashed it under his bedroll, heartsick, dreading what it might contain. The unopened letter had plunged him back into the maelstrom. He was now shocked by his own thoughts. It occurred to him that the work had become his drug of choice. Never had he imagined that even mindfulness could be a means of escape...
Pushing such thoughts aside, however, he was soon back at it, dropping trees, which is how the afternoon passed, just another day in the woods.
The sun was still high in the west when he gathered up his gear and headed for camp.
FIVE
Pinecone Peters slammed down the receiver. He was pissed beyond words. He’d been working the phone all afternoon, indeed, most of the week, and had nothing to show for it. He had just spoken with the lead attorney at the Colorado Environmental Coalition. The man had taken twenty minutes to explain in mind-numbing detail why the CEC had decided not to pursue a lawsuit to halt the Bowen Gulch timber sale.
“It’s too late,” the attorney told him. “As you know we missed the deadline for the administrative appeal and we think our chance of success at this point in the courts is not very good. A judge would probably rule that we have no standing. Our staff and resources at CEC are limited as I’m sure you know. So...we’ve decided to focus our energies where we think we can have a real impact. We...uh, just feel that we have a better shot with some other projects. I’m sorry about this. I know how you feel about Bowen Gulch. We feel the same way but we’re just slammed. If we had a larger staff, maybe...It was a tough call for us.”
Everything the attorney said made perfect sense. Pinecone could not fault the logic, but dammit it still sounded like defeatism. He had been hearing the same story all week. He had heard it from state and local environmental groups, and from the big nationals like Audubon, the Wilderness Society and the World Wildlife Fund. In a funk, he had even tried the Isaac Walton League and Trout Unlimited, with the same result. Nothing.
No one could explain exactly how it had happened, how the environmental activists whose job it was to watchdog the Forest Service somehow missed the deadline to appeal the decision for the Bowen Gulch timber sale. It was a collective woops, and in the wake of this monumental screw-up the conservation community had turned gun-shy. They had given up without a fight, thrown in the towel; everyone, that is, except for a radical fringe group named Earth First!, which had already staged several demonstrations to protest the sale. Earth First! had become notorious for direct actions like tree-sitting, tree-spiking and monkey-wrenching, “eco-defense” they called it. Pinecone had friends in the group and occasionally joined them in direct actions. He found himself gravitating toward their radical viewpoint because in his view the Earth Firsters had their priorities straight, one of the few environmental groups that did. Earth First! believed that positive social change never happens without jeopardy. In other words, society only changes for the better when courageous individuals put their asses on the line for something they believe is worth fighting for, and if necessary, dying for. Needless to say, their risky style was not for the faint of heart.
Pinecone also knew that direct action by Earth First! alone would not succeed in halting this particular sale. Numbers mattered. Bowen Gulch would only be saved if the wider public could somehow be induced to weigh in.
He gently massaged the base of his nose. His face throbbed and itched at the same time. The body of the nose was bulbous, still swollen and tender from the thrashing that deranged logger had given him in the Nugget the previous week.
Pinecone was frustrated, yes, but even more than that he was disgusted. The folks who ought to be acting were doing nothing to prevent the despoliation of one of North America’s last best places. If words still had any meaning, Bowen Gulch surely qualified as ‘special.’ Located in the Never Summer Mountain Range near the western boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park, the high valley featured the most impressive stand of Engelmann spruce in the southern Rockies.
Pinecone knew the place well. He had walked the Gulch many times while employed by the US Forest Service. An afternoon spent wandering through the high forest always rejuvenated him. The Gulch was special not only because of the remarkable size of the trees – some of the spruces measured five feet in diameter – but also because of their antiquity. A few weeks before, he had consulted a retired forester who told him that many of the big trees were in excess of 800 years old. The old ranger had cored numerous trees in Bowen Gulch and by counting the rings had determined their age. The place deserved protection solely on this basis. The rare combination of antiquity and structural decadence made Bowen Gulch a biodiversity stronghold. The place was a haven for all manner of wildlife, including several rare and endangered species.
The problem, of course, was that the Forest Service did not see it this way. The timber beasts who ran the agency regarded great age and structural decadence as a liability, not an asset. “Over mature,” they called it. It was one of the terms they bandied about that had convinced Pinecone that ranger Dougie Bennett and his timber sale staffers were out of their minds. They had it exactly backwards. Their “cure” was the problem. The current policy of extraction meant replacing ancient forest with “young thrifty stands,” another mad expression. The problem was that most of the old growth was already gone. A recent inventory had shown that after more than a century of logging less than 10% of national forest land remained in a pristine state. From the standpoint of biodiversity, the numbers were grim.
Convinced that the best strategy to save Bowen Gulch was to share it with others, the previous summer Pinecone had begun leading hikes into the area, often on Sundays. Hiking the Gulch was like being in church, only better. The cathedral forests along Bowen creek invariably reduced visitors to respectful silence, even reverence. The place was the real deal. Seeing was believing. A single visit usually did the trick. People came away passionate about saving it.
Many were outraged that the agency would even consider logging such a place. Unfortunately, building this kind of awareness was a slow process, and time was short.
For weeks Pinecone had been searching for someone to lead the campaign to stop the sale. It had to be someone of stature who was well connected, and already known to the broader community. The “someone” had to be tough enough to take the heat and charismatic enough to rally others. But that someone was proving elusive. After weeks of searching Pinecone had come up dry. Was he chasing a ghost?
Starting from the top, he went down the list one more time. He had already contacted everyone on it at least once. Each name had a check mark beside it.
Wait a minute. Ah, yes...
All, that is, save for one. He had forgotten. One name was still unchecked, Dr. Mickey Newsome, a math professor at the University of Colorado who for many years had chaired the Boulder chapter of the Sierra Club. For weeks Pinecone had been trying to reach Newsome, without success. He had called him a dozen times but apparently the man was out of town.
What the heck. Nothing to lose at this point.
He picked up the phone, dialed and listened for the ring.
“Hello.”
“Dr. Newsome?”
“Speaking. Who’s this?”
“Sir, you probably don’t remember me. We met last year at a Sierra Club event. My name is Pinecone Peters.”
“Call me Mickey. It was a potluck and I do remember you. I never forget a face, or a voice.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks.”
“I was out of town.”
“That’s what your wife told me.”
“I’m just back from South America. I’m a climber, you know.”
“Really? Sounds like fun.”
“Yeah, dangerous as hell but fun too, you bet.” There was a chuckle on the other end of the line. “So, what can I do for you?”
Pinecone told him about the decision to log Bowen Gulch.
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