Crummy
The crummy is a flatbed truck, open-backed, with sides built from slats of cedar, a roof of corrugated steel. As the truck balances around the steep curves of the mountain road on a morning like this – dark, another hour yet before sunlight – it rumbles hollow although we are packed man-to-man inside. We sit on four cedar benches, one bench against each side and two together running down the middle, ten loggers to a bench – the lucky ones leaning against the shaking walls, the unlucky sitting in the middle, back to back, nodding off to snooze with only another man’s spine for support. The worst spot is next to the open end of the crummy where the air swirls with dust and exhaust. The seat next to the driver is prime territory, especially in winter, but even in summer it is prized for its leather cushion and its windows that keep out the weather and the dust. That seat is reserved for the high rigger, sometimes a hooker or a faller, never one of the chokers, chasers or buckers or any of the young men who do not have the skill of the old ones. They know their place is here in the rear of the truck.
This week we did not need the hazard stick to tell us we would be on early shift. We could feel it in the dryness of the air, static crackle of pine cones underfoot, that faded summer smell of woods like paper waiting to flame. Hazard is high. The high rigger announced the change yesterday while we stood trackside waiting for the crummy to bring us down. We would need to be back up the hill by four the next morning so we could finish our shift before the day’s full heat turned the woods into kindling. This is government policy, not that of the camp, and we all suspect that the Mac-Blo company would just as soon keep us working on the mountain till we burned.
Last night the cook made roast beef and we ate enough to weight us to our chairs. We played poker and smoked and listened to Jack Benny and tried to squeeze as much time out of the evening as we could. Then we were up at three, in the crummy as soon as we’d had our fill. We will arrive trackside when dawn waits at the edge of the woods and then we will have to hike for another forty minutes in the glimmering light – fallers and buckers hefting their axes and saws while the chokers and hookers carry the choker cables and choker bells that are needed to replace the ones that broke – and by five we will reach the cold-deck pile where the logs are stacked and our paid work can begin.
But now we are invisible in the dark. No one is tracking our time. There is nothing yet to cut or choke and we can lean against another man’s back and nod into whatever shallow sleep the bouncing truck will allow. We will have to be up at three again tomorrow and the morning after that, eating stacks of flapjacks when we are too tired to chew. Then we sit in this crummy in a waking sleep that rocks with the rocking of the truck until it seems that night is not a time but a place we inhabit and that daylight lies so far from our bunks that we must all be woken and fed and trucked these dim hours up the mountain if we are ever to see the sun.
One man has a headache, another man’s spine is rattled sore with each bump of the road, and the shaking of the crummy makes us all clench our teeth while the stinking exhaust gets sucked into the back of the truck, but we know that the morning beyond the crummy is grey-blue and sharp, not smoke-filled and angry with the summer’s orange flames, and we are glad to be travelling to work not with hoses and buckets for water but with axes and saws. The space between the benches is so narrow that our knees tap against each other and we catch another man’s eye and nod that the day has begun.
This morning we ride with the new hook tender. He is here to replace Charlie, our own sly Charlie Chaplin – the only one among us who named himself. His replacement sits in the middle of the truck straight as a tent pole. He arrives on early shift when the mountain is dressed for mourning, the sky dark as we sneak the new man past the trees. Forty men sit around him as if we could offer him the protection we failed to give the last one.
We all recall the wind and the rain of the day that took Charlie, and we all know there are times when we do not need a hazard stick to tell us that danger is near, just as there are mornings when a man wakes and feels dread not of today or tomorrow but of a day that is already gone and he waits for what the light will bring that he cannot quite remember, but he knows, even in his sleep he knows, that he has done something wrong and he fears that the morning will let him see it. Any man has had dreams when he wants to run but his legs and arms cannot move and he wants to scream but his lips will not open and he wakes trembling with the failure of his will.
We read the hazard stick for the future, not the past. In the woods a day is new and death is erased like the chalk dust that billows up from the road and falls as soon as the crummy has passed. Charlie’s replacement doesn’t know this camp and its stories. His mind isn’t chipped like the crummy’s wooden floor worn into sawdust by the spikes of our boots.
An apple falls from someone’s tin pail. We watch it bounce out the back of the truck. The crummy grinds up the last one hundred yards that pitch steep and unforgiving. Dust from the road swirls inside the crummy to cover us the colour of chalk so when we finally reach trackside and the engine stops – there it is, that sliver of a sun, the welcoming chatter of birds – we crawl stiff from the crummy into the morning’s grey-blue light and we shake off this white dust like men carved new from stone.
Tin Men
In summer we call her the ice cream ship. She’s the same vessel that comes up coast all the other seasons, a plume of steam dragging through the sky every two weeks bringing food, kerosene, men. From May Day to Labour Day she carries ice cream. Proper, store-bought, Vancouver ice cream. The furnace room walls are sweating, but on the second level the freezers are lined with vanilla as smooth and white as the hull.
The high rigger is the first to see her. Strapped to the peak of the spar tree he’s just topped, its tip crashing to the ground like the face of a mountain, he wipes the glare from his eyes to peer out across the ocean and there she is.
Summer. Saturday. Cedar branches spread motionless in the stagnant air. “Coming in,” the high rigger shouts, his hands a funnel around his mouth. “She’s coming in!” The chaser and the chokers turn toward the sea.
From where the hooking crew stands, they see nothing but trees. Not the high rigger half a mile away, not the faller and bucker working uphill. The high rigger’s voice crests then dips, amplified by the mountain that arches behind him. Unhooking his rope he sits on the spar’s tip, a cylinder ten inches wide and two hundred feet high, his boots crossed at the ankle.
It’s another hour before the ship nudges into the bay. Distances are deceptive in the woods. We have time to ride the crummy to the camp and then shave, smoke, before we catch the railway speeder the last six miles down. We are Camp B, up Tin Hat Mountain. The loggers from the other camp are already standing restless by the water. We jump off the speeder where the rail line meets the shore. Without spikes our town boots feel new and slick on sand. We wear canvas pants, leather suspenders, clean cotton shirts. The Swedes and Norwegians are tanned bark-brown and the Scots are sunburned. We nod at the other loggers. We watch the ship dock.
The ship lowers a long metal limb. It stirs the air so that a hundred feet away the warm stench hits us. Rancid meat, although we know the smell isn’t meat, and isn’t coming from the ship. The air is thick with it. The greenhorns gag, tongues pressed to the roof of their mouths. We all cover our noses with fists or palms.
“Is it always this bad?”
The coffins are made of tin, and the sun reflects off each sharp angle.
“Jesus, they’ll be fried in there like strips of bacon.”
Two weeks the coffins have waited. They line the dock now in a tidy row: a high rigger, a faller, and four of a fire crew. The West Coast – White Rock to the panhandle – takes two loggers a day. The inlets of the province are studded with tin men.
Last night a group of boys dared each other to run up and down the dock, and to prove they’d done it they plunked rocks and driftwood on top of each tin box, as if the bodies were not heavy enough to we
igh the coffins down.
None of us can see the names. We know the loggers in the tins, though not by what their mothers call them. We know the smell of their skin in the bunkhouse, who butters both sides of his bread and who gets quiet in thunder. Almost all the men are rechristened the moment they set foot in the camp. Step-and-a-half because he limps. Tangoola because he has long monkey arms and the name sounds like the jungle. Seaball, no one knows why. Snowball, so Seaball would have a twin. One-eyed-Pete, who had one eye, we sometimes called One – Hey One, hand me the Swede. When a logger dies, the clerk announces his real name, both the front and the back – Who has Rolf Jensen’s boots now? He hasn’t paid out. His birth name is naked, how the clerk says it too loud.
The winch angles back and forth from ship to wharf like a steel elbow. A wooden box splits open, the cans spilling out and nudging against the coffins, as if the tin were magnetic, metal finding metal. Children from the mill town cheer as sailors roll the frozen tubs down the length of the wharf, the sailors’ hands sticking to the frost. They run to meet the ice cream, then slow and back away when they meet that smell. A girl begins to cry.
The younger men always eat too fast, and the pain shoots through their sinuses. The first bite of ice cream – a double cone for each logger – and they can feel it in the back of their eyes.
The winch loads the coffins. The first one twirls slightly, hanging uneven, the head heavier than the feet. As each coffin is lifted, the driftwood and rocks on the lids fall and splash.
Boys stand knee-deep in the ocean, one spitting a mouthful of ice cream to see if it will float. The sailors drag the containers away from the wharf so the women are clear of the smell. Ice-vapor rises in front of their dresses as they scoop deeper. We hide our stumped fingers, missing thumbs, behind the cones, so the ladies won’t see.
Blackie has all his fingers. Cat’s Paw lost four, but he still works the steam donkey. The thumb is the worst. Without one it is hard even to hold a cone. Any man would trade three fingers for a thumb.
In this way we know each other. How a hand holds an ice cream, how a nickname recalls a scar. If a man is injured on a hill, there’d be a couple loggers allowed to carry him down, but if a man dies, we drag the body to the cold-deck pile and keep falling the trees. Company policy. No point wasting the day. The logger stiffens and grows cold. Sometimes a branch falls across the body, and we are careful to lever it off.
At dinner in the cookhouse after a day like that, we are quiet. His sweat dries in his undershirt draped across the bunkhouse window. The curve of his spine dips the cot.
Two weeks later we meet the ice cream ship and pass his nickname to a new logger. Hey, One-Eyed, we call to a man who has two.
Fall
The first drop of rain is quiet, tentative, falling like a question a man could convince himself he has not heard.
Autumn hovers. The sky rests heavy above us though we still walk on pine needles dry from the day’s heat.
Rain on the donkey’s metal skin.
Then rain darkens leather and swells our flannel pockets. Our wet wool socks blister our heels. Rain falls in eyes, on lips, on shoulders, in creeks down our backs now wet in that tender spot on the upper spine shivering a man’s hands that grip a saw beaded with rain.
Each time the faller hacks his ax into the back cut, his face is sprayed with water that spits from the gouge. When the back cut is open, two fallers jam a piece of wood into it to direct the tree’s lean. Then they start with a new cut on the reverse. They drop their axes and pick up a two-handled saw, one man on either end of the grey horizon-tal line. Their sawing shakes the branches so water dumps onto their hats and shoulders. Bark is slick. The moss that grows on the bark is sodden. The fallers balance on slippery springboards on either side of the trunk and they pull the misery whip back and forth, back and forth, its teeth stubborn against the wet wood. The spray of water paces each pull.
The tree splashes when it hits the ground.
Soon the rain will pockmark the roads and float pine needles to the sea. Soon water will bloat the earth, this soft crumbling shell of wet dirt lying between us and the sea that threatens to open under our boots.
Through the fall and winter and spring, it will rain. Twenty days in a row, forty days in a row, rain so constant that the air itself is rain. We wring our undershirts, leaving puddles on the bunkhouse floor that steam in the stove’s heat. Outside, fungus roots the trees. Inside, even our skin grows its own strange mould, darkening in brown patches on our chests, backs, armpits, groins, wherever the skin is welcoming and moist.
Daylight is too tired to rise. The sun sleeps its day under clouds grey as the dank blankets that tangle our cots. We rise. We work in rain with our pants hanging heavy at the knee. Our canvas shirts stiffen wet into tortoise shells. Any light that manages to struggle through the trees is lit green by branches the way light in the ocean shines green.
The summer’s trees lie scattered on the ground – felled, bucked, waiting to be choked. We work where solid earth ends at the coast, where mist rises and rain falls until a man could believe there is no division between land and water, that even this last wet line on the map is gone.
Roll of Bills
On the morning of Christmas Eve, the logging camp shuts down. The generator dies – quiet splits the year – and we are on the Queen Mary with our cards, with the booze we’ve smuggled on the ship, another brown-paper purchase each time the motors slow and we run down the platform through the stink of oil and into a beer parlour and then back inside.
Drink up, it’s Christmas! Drink up, we’ve escaped!
The camp is back in the woods, dim as a cataract. The bunkhouses, the wooden sidewalks, the cookhouse, the com-missary, all quiet and dark and empty of men. There will be no falling for a week. No bucking, no donkey loading, no rigging. Seven days we are free. We sit inside the ship’s smoky warmth and don’t watch the mountains that pass us by. We toast the holiday with our bottles of whiskey and flick our cards and come to fisticuffs with all the pent-up energy of no work as the engines hum us to the city.
Our celebration has no need for a Christmas tree – who’d want the smell of pine if you’re not being paid to cut it down? On the ship we review what we’ve bought and what we are going to buy – whiskey, rum, a cozy twelve-pack of beer to furnish our hotel room. A man needs something to wake up for in the morning. Those who don’t talk about the booze are already drinking serious and can hardly let their lips off their bottlenecks to toast the day.
Vancouver. Port town, party town. Open up and let us in.
Through the ship’s rain-streaked glass we see the red neon “W” twirling two hundred feet above the sea. “Woodward’s” is another name for money, a twelve-storey building with windows row on row. But in the dark just this single letter shines to greet us: red legs stretched wide.
We’re off the ship and on streets that cannot absorb the rain. It slides down brick buildings, down glass buildings higher than a Doug fir. We are used to ground that gives with moisture, water softening dirt until it welcomes our boots. We are used to branches that dump water on us as we pass, and the sound of wood as the saw chews its fibres. But not this slickness, hardness, the harsh rasp of metal as the street-car squeals the shining corners, a noise so cold and hollow it sounds like the rain’s own cry.
Then the yeasty smell of donuts steaming circles from the machine.
A crowd of black umbrellas walks toward us. The streets are cramped with high buildings pressing back the fog, the bustle of long-coated men and tight-waisted women – the men turtling their necks into their collars to keep out the wet, the ladies red-cheeked from their hours in the shops, gripping cranky children as they crush with a gust of warm air through the swinging doors. Everyone buying for someone.
A small boy bends over to pry at a wad of gum flattened into the sidewalk. His mother swats him, packages spilling out of her bag.
Beneath the lights and noise and the rainbows on the oil sli
cking water that eddies at the curb, there is the blank screen of this city. Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas! Walk on these streets too long and a man feels the pavement through his spine.
We scatter. To the beer parlours and the dance clubs, through Jap Town and Chinatown, past the neon signs for the Ovaltine Café and the White Lunch, past the neon sign – the giant happy glowing pig – for Save-On-Meats, its carcasses hanging like red curtains in the glass, and on to the Harlem Nocturne and the Smiling Buddha, the streets shimmering and tipping in the rain.
Then we get a look at the ladies. Soft white narrow creatures, women sipping their drinks and slow-rocking their hips. Wall-to-wall mirrors make more and more women, make more of the curves of their bodies than even our eyes can caress. They stand on one side of the bar, men on the other. Crinkle of a cigarette package. Whine of a horn. The air in between the men and women is crackling with Players and brass.
We haven’t been this close in months.
Through the smoke they glance at our plaid Macs and dirty fingernails, our jackets pregnant with bottles near on empty. Glenn Miller blares loud enough to lift our heavy boots. It’s a pleasure just to watch a lady dab her lipstick and try not to sway, looking over her shoulder and then touching her shoulder as if to give a man permission to do the same.
We are numb and happy. Full of that soft-legged, heavy-tongued ease, we elbow the shy boys toward the prettiest ladies and then saunter outdoors to spit on streets where no spitting is allowed.
Tangoola chicken-walks down Hastings as he tries to find his way to another drink.
Frog raises his bottle to Charlie – We miss your fiddle on the boat, here’s to what tunes you play up there – then he sells a case of beer to the Indians who lean against the door that says No Indians or Dogs.
Smokey guides his woman up the stairs inside the Patricia, hoping she doesn’t catch sight of the crushed mouse on the hallway floor.
And Shakespeare has been rolled, but he doesn’t know it yet.
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