“A zipper?”
“Cancer, you know...”
“Oh Jeez, Carl, I...”
Olsen raised a hand. “Whoa ... Not so fast.”
“Huh?”
“Do I look deceased?” The old man chuckled to himself as he tucked in a shirttail.
“Sorry, Carl...”
The smile vanished. Olsen bristled. “Well, smart-ass! You asked me how I was and I told you. That doesn’t make me a charity case!” But the dark look passed as swiftly as it had appeared. Carl’s face softened. “Heck,” he said, “I may not be a spring chicken but most days I feel pretty damn good. Naw, I got nuthin’ to complain about.”
“You look good.” It was true. Despite the wear and tear of seventy-odd years and the slow tumor corroding his insides, Olsen looked remarkably well. He had a healthy color and exuded vitality.
“But enough of that,” he said. “What you been up to?”
I told him about the courthouse job and that I was not happy with it. “I’ve decided to look for something better,” I said.
“They’ll snap up a smart young man like you. A fellow with a college degree and all.”
Then, I told him. “Carl, I walked away from the degree.”
Olsen grunted. “You walked away? Well ... why?” Blunt language is one of Olsen’s quirky habits. His flinty style often causes sparks, a style I had admired; but not that morning.
I just glared back. If there is anything I hate it is being grilled about why I failed to pick up the degree. “You knew I changed my major...” I said to him.
“No...”
“Yes. After...” I let the words hang, so there could be no mistake about my meaning. “...from zoology to philosophy.”
“Hmmm.” Another grunt. Silence again drew us apart. Carl turned his head to the side and coughed, then lifted his head slightly. He squinted at me through his bifocals, his eyes narrowing to rivets. “Philosophy, huh? Don’t tell me. You ain’t one of them purists?”
Carl has a way of turning a phrase. Maybe it was his distinctive tone, so unique to his way of speaking, and I mean caustic. Like vinegar. Whatever. Anyway, the absurd moment hit me sideways. I started laughing and could not stop. I remember grabbing Carl’s arm to catch my breath, but was I immediately seized again. So it went.
Olsen was not amused. Wary of the rashness of youth, he watched all of this with a stern eye and a disapproving frown. To say he was put out would be an understatement. But there must have been something contagious about my fit, because by degrees the intangible “something”, or whatever, slowly wormed its way through his tough old hide. By and by, despite himself, against his own better judgment, Carl warmed to it. When he finally let go and joined in his paunch started heaving like a big bag of Jell-o.
The common cause was just as well, as it saved me from having to tell the rest of the story about my failure to pick up the degree, and even more emphatically, my deep disillusionment with that proud citadel of reason, I mean the university, with its vaunted pathways to higher learning.
Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I have no problem with reason or higher learning. But I did and do have issues with the perfunctory professors, the men who preside over the dissemination of knowledge. So called. Brilliant fools, with a few notable exceptions, one being Leadbetter. After four years of classwork I had learned, you see, that there is more than a little truth to the old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
In the end it failed to hold me. By the start of my senior year I was in open rebellion and when the time came to graduate I did what a great many college seniors only dream of doing. I followed my stars.
On the day of the commencement I went out and got shit-faced, a wild day and a night of which I remember nothing, from approximately the moment I climbed up on the table at the Red Garter waving a frothing schooner of Coors to recite my epitaph to all of that.
Blotto. The only time I ever woke up in an alley.
The old man caught a feather in his throat and fell out coughing. The geezer seemed prone to it. His eyes looked like they were about to bug out of his head. I clapped him on the back a few times. When he finally came out of it Carl stared at me with something like incredulity.
“So,” he said. “Arghhugh-ghmm.” He had to clear his throat again before he could continue. “Arghummmm. So let me get this … umm … straight. You’re telling me that, uh, after four years of college you got no degree, no career, and no, uh, plans or anything?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
He ran a rough hand over his scratchy beard. Carl’s jowls jiggled. He seemed to be figuring. Reaching up, he removed his fedora and palmed his thinning scalp. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he whispered. Replacing the hat, he rubbed the stubble on his chin and looked me over like he was fitting me out for a new suit or a coffin. “Well dammit, I could use another man, provided he can heft a saw. Are you green?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can you hold up your end of a chainsaw?” he nearly shouted.
“Carl, I’ve never run a chainsaw.”
The old man frowned. He appeared to be thinking. When he spoke next his voice was like thunder. “Well, a man’s got to start some damn place. All right, all right, tell you what. I got near eighty acres of pole timber to thin this summer, before the snow flies. Lodgepole pine. It grows like a weed, thick as dog hair or spring grass. I’ve got a contract for as many corral poles as I can send down the Interstate.”
As I listened I remembered something. Yes, about how the old man had come out of retirement. Six months after closing down the professional hunting guide business that had made him a household name in rural Colorado, Carl changed his mind and went back to work. Not as a guide though, his hunting guide days were over. But Carl’s the sort who needs to work to be happy. Work is in his blood. Put a man like that out to pasture and you might as well sign his death warrant.
“Oh yes,” I said, “I remember hearing … something about.... Didn’t you start up another business? Posts and poles, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right. I deliver fence poles all over, Denver, Colorado Springs, Omaha, Wichita, you name it, as far east as Kansas City. And I’m looking to hire a coupla’ fellows. It’s one reason I’m in town. I need cutters. Guys who can hack it. Men who can go a week without a bath and don’t mind dust in their oatmeal. Get the picture? Guys who ain’t squeamish, or scared of bears in the woods. I’m talking seasonal work you understand, nothing permanent. Probably I can keep you busy into September. I don’t pay like the big outfits. I can’t. I’m a small-time operator. But it’s honest work and I pay in cash. Interested?”
As I recall, I said nothing. The offer had taken me by surprise.
“If you want to...uh, why not drive up next week and give ‘er a whack?”
“Up to North Park?”
“Right.”
“Well...”
“Tom, it’s great country. You oughta’ know. You’ve seen it.”
“I know, Carl. But I’m not equipped. I don’t own a saw.”
Olsen brusquely dismissed the objection with a wave of the arm. “No problem. I got an ol’ Homelite you can borry. We’ll fix you up, gear wise. Don’t you worry. You can work it off. What do you say?”
But I still hesitated. I was thinking.
The old man’s demeanor changed with astonishing swiftness. Bristling, he doused me with vinegar. “So, what’s the hold up? You said yourself you’re looking. You think you’re too good for real work? Is that it? Huh? You think you’re above a little sweat? Maybe you can’t handle an honest eight-hour day? Hmmph! You got fluff between your ears like so many youngsters do these days...” He exploded, “The whole damn nation’s in the ditch, gone to the dogs. So which is it?”
I never did understand exactly how I made the decision, that morning, whether it was the acid in Olsen’s voice or the menacing expression on his weather-beaten old brow. Either could have curdled fresh milk. But the truth is,
I didn’t have a thing to lose and I was genuinely intrigued by the offer. There are worse ways to spend a summer than camping in the mountains.
“OK,” I said. “Why not? I can’t think of a reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Good.” he said. “Good. Now you’re talking, Jim Dandy.” Olsen was beaming, clearly satisfied. No more vinegar. Another wink cinched the deal.
TWENTY
Three days later, I loaded my gear into the back of my decrepit Toyota pickup and motored up the Poudre River Highway to Cameron Pass. I knew the road quite well. I had driven the pass before. The eastern approach is steep but has no switchbacks. You down shift the last six miles. The final grade follows a long, slow ascent to the summit. As always, I was stunned at the first sight of the Nokhu Crags looming in the West, jagged, snow-capped, pristine.
The descent clings to a vertiginous cliff for miles before descending to the Michigan River. Five miles west of Gould I took the Rand cutoff, a shortcut to the southern end of North Park; and motored first through lodgepole, then, scrubby sage and occasional aspen stands, until I came to a high point along the shoulder of Owl Mountain. It’s a long ridge that intrudes into the southeastern portion of the valley. From the top the view is incredible. The Rockies dominate the horizon in every direction. In the west the snowy Park Range was aflame in the morning sun – the highest peaks suspended above the valley like a glistening crown of jewels.
I descended again and the panorama disappeared from view. The road narrowed to dirt and finally ended at the whistle-stop known as Rand, where I regained the main highway. I headed south and within a few miles started the roller-coaster climb toward Willow Creek Pass.
Twenty minutes later, near the foot of the pass, I turned off the highway onto a Forest Service access road and had no trouble finding Olsen’s landing a quarter mile above Snyder Creek.
Olsen was on the deck, apparently working on an antiquated crane which he had partially disassembled. Equipment and tools lay scattered around him. Carl was dressed in a ragged t-shirt, faded jeans and bright red suspenders. On his head was the general purpose fedora he’d probably worn for twenty years. His summer quarters were not much, a tiny trailer parked at the edge of the landing. But with the Never Summer Mountains just two miles southeast of camp he had a spectacular living room.
First thing, Carl sent me packing down along the creek to pick out a suitable campsite and unload my gear. That done, I returned to the trailer. Carl met me at the screen door, a toothpick in his teeth. He had just finished lunch; and promptly handed me a beat-out old Homelite and said “Let’s go.” Picking his molars, Carl led me out into a patch of sapling-sized lodgepoles. As we walked he explained about keeping “the stumps under six inches” and “the slash under eighteen.”
When we were deep in a pole patch Carl reclaimed the saw and started it up with two sharp pulls on the cord. I watched as he dropped a spindly tree, then showed me how to use a logger’s tape to measure it to length. A logger’s tape resembles a carpenter’s tape except that it fastens to your belt. Olsen had customized it by affixing a specially bent horseshoe nail to the end of the tape, for easy attachment. He planted the nail in the butt of the downed tree and began methodically trimming branches with the saw as he moved up the sapling. The tape unreeled as he worked.
He handled the chainsaw with surprising dexterity and economy of motion. I was impressed. When he had done with the trimming Olsen grabbed the tape in his left hand. Leaning down, he stretched it tight against the tree and found his mark. Eyeballing the spot, he let the tape go and cut the pole to the desired length. He flipped the pole over with his boot – a nifty move – and trimmed the backside. Voila!
In short order the tree had become a sixteen-foot corral pole. When he was done Carl gave the tape a flick of his wrist to release the nail. The reel was spring-loaded and the tape came whipping back as it rewound with a loud z-i-i-i-i-i-n-g that made me duck.
Olsen found this hilarious. His technique had been honed by years of doing. He repeated it again with a second tree, then handed over the saw and tape, and stepped aside to watch, still picking his teeth, as I dropped my first tree.
I was tentative, at first. But after some coaching the old man decided I was ready for a solo run. At that point, he went off to attend to other matters.
The trial with the saw passed without incident, except that I dipped the blade in the dirt a few times, which rocked several teeth. A half-hour later Olsen returned with a can of gas, bar oil, and a round file in hand, as if in expectation of the worst. He proceeded to show me how to sharpen the chain. The lesson with the file did not deter his young recruit, me, from asking the insistent question.
“OK. But how often do you sharpen it?”
“Olsen stared over his glasses with a look so formidable I knew I had asked a dumb one. The patient tone of his voice took some of the sting out of the look. “Whenever it gets dull. OK?” (Stress on the “OK?”)
“Right.”
“Is that too hard to remember...” Olsen’s left eyebrow cocked as he unloaded with the whammy, “for a college drop out?” The weather-beaten old face was grimmer than hell, but one eye twinkled insanely.
“No. I got it.”
“Gooood.”
The rest was practice. Nothing fancy, just simple repetition, which is the path to perfection, or, at any rate, mastery. So it went. By the end of the first day I had the basic moves down and was finding the rhythm.
It was not until mid-afternoon of the following day, though, that I discovered I was enjoying myself. At some point everything just...sort of...clicked, as if a switch had been thrown. Suddenly I was in the groove, digging it. Despite the insane racket there was no hint of anxiety or worldly angst, only a perverse feeling of contentment. The honeyed moment came as a monumental surprise because it ran counter to my every expectation. Never in a million years did I suppose I would actually enjoy running a chainsaw.
What surprised me most was how easily it came to me, how quickly the moves became second nature. Stacking the poles was also more enjoyable than I had expected.
I could not help but wonder if I had been born for this.
“Jeez, what a surprise, I told the old man after day two, making no effort now to conceal my enthusiasm. You know, I thought this type of work was, uh, I don’t know what I thought. Grunt work. Drudgery, I suppose. But, hey, it isn’t half-bad. Olsen was grinning from ear to ear. To tell you the truth, it’s kind of...”
He cut in. “Like a happy kick in the shorts. Right?”
“Right. But how did you know?”
Ripping off his hat, the old man bent over and roared with laughter; which set the tub of lard in his belly to quivering again. “You have to ask!”
Living out of a tent in the woods and cooking over an open fire was not half bad, either. To tell you the truth, the practical simplicity of it all was much to my liking.
There was, of course, a learning curve. Success with a chainsaw, even survival, depends on adhering to a few basic rules, which are mostly common sense. Fortunately, I was a quick study.
Even so, I had a minor setback the morning of the third day when I cut my knee. It happened while trimming branches. I accidentally moved my leg in too close to my saw’s twenty-two inch bar. Somehow my jeans, the cotton fabric, became entangled in the chain, which instantly pulled the spinning teeth down into my leg. Thankfully, the cut was superficial, nothing serious. The gash was shallow, no more than a flesh wound. But it did require several stitches.
When I showed Olsen the damage he disappeared into his trailer and reappeared with a sewing kit and a bottle of peroxide. It was, he said, a case of on-the-job training. “Have fun,” he said, smiling wickedly as he handed it over.
“You mean, you’re not going to sew me up?”
“Do I look like a nurse?” More battery acid.
I threaded the needle, applied the peroxide, and though the parted flaps of skin made me shudder, nonetheless, I stoically stitched t
hem together, gritting my teeth with each stitch, grit in place of anesthesia. What was the alternative? The nearest medical clinic was in Laramie, three hours away – too far to drive for just a few stitches.
The next morning I was back to work, a little stiff in the joint, but none the worse for it. If anything, the mishap was a blessing, as it taught me an important lesson. I had learned the serious consequences of getting too near those razor-sharp teeth.
The slip with the chain never recurred.
There were no other surprises. I quickly learned to eyeball the proper spacing, though it took me several more days to master the art of selecting the best ‘leave tree,’ in other words, the lodgepole with the fullest crown. By this time I was already picking up speed. By week’s end I was moving through Olsen’s patch of dog hair like a one-man-swarm of pine beetles.
I recall that, once, I happened to look up in the thick of it and noticed Carl standing off to one side, watching me work. The old man was grinning like the Cheshire cat. I knew then I was home free.
The following week another hired man showed up, a seasoned cutter named Dave Roper. He is a giant of a man, about six-feet-seven. Roper had missed the start-up because he had just gotten married in San Francisco. He and his young bride, Nancy, were still on their honeymoon. They established their own camp in a lodgepole stand about a mile above the landing. Roper was a woodsman and, like me, felt right at home in the mountains. But Nancy was from Omaha, a city girl and hated “roughing it.”
Within the week the honeymoon was over.
I shared my evening meal with them several times, until I became embroiled in one of their bitter quarrels. Dave and Nancy’s arguments were soon the regular horror.
It did not take Roper and I long to cut our way through eighty-odd acres of lodgepole pine. In late August, when the final sloping piece of ground was done and the last poles had been stacked on the landing, I decided I was ready for the big time. With part of my pay I bought a new pair of boots (caulks or, as they say, ‘Corks’) and a spanking new Swedish saw with a larger bore. Then, I jumped over the divide and hired on with Jacques St. Clair who had a big logging contract underway about thirty miles southwest of Granby. That was how I moved out of the poles and into the big timber.
NSummer Page 12