A Day in the Life of a Logger

© 2004 copyright Raymond C. Evans

A really small percentage of people in this great country really know what it’s like to be a logger. I’m not all that sure what it’s like today either but I can tell you what it was like for me in the 1950s and 60s. We know that logging practices differ around the country as do the areas and various types of timber. We know for instance that some logging today is practiced as “tree farming”, the trees are planted all at the same time, harvested at the same time, most all of a standard size and shape and most all of the work done by machines with a whole new breed of loggers at the hydraulic controls.

This story is about the logging of yesteryear. We too, had machines, but many men were required to get the job done. This was old growth timber; men were required for their muscle and grit. They were required to pull large steel cables, carry the large steel hooks and shackles, sledgehammers and saws. We called the people who worked in the saw-mills, “sliver pickers”, ourselves, “timber beasts”.

There were three main aspects in logging where I worked, the men and their saws who brought the trees to the ground and made them into logs, the drivers and their trucks who took them to the mill and men like me who worked on the “rigging”. We were the ones who brought the logs from where they lay and loaded them on the trucks.

This was logging in the “old growth” redwoods, the terrain was rarely flat, and usually you worked in dust or mud, seldom without bruises to one’s body and never in clean clothes except for the first two or three minutes of work. As a whole, it was dangerous work. Many loggers paid for the privilege to ply their occupation with their lives, many more with crippled bodies, crushed by shifting logs or flying debris. Almost all who would survive the rigors of logging would be “stove up”, or “rump sprung”, as we called it, by the time they were fifty years old. Many would have to seek an easier way of life and work to live out their following years.

In those days we were considered real men; at least we thought we were. There was no tree that ever grew, no ground so steep and rough, no weather bad enough, that could keep us from getting the tree and its logs to the mill.

Many loggers today are vilified as “tree killers”, by some, most all of them live in houses made of lumber, all enjoy wood products, from toilet paper to care for one end, to Kleenex for the other. We read the Sunday morning paper with headlines about saving our forests, open the paper up and set aside about five pounds of worth of undesired advertising pages. This is how they save the forests, those champions of environmental conservation.

While we are on the subject of logging and the environment, let me tell you about the life of trees, lumber and consumption. Fifty years ago I was logging in the California redwoods; these were beautiful trees, a beautiful forest. When our work was done, only logging debris remained, it would be enough to drive an environmentalist insane with rage. I recently drove by this same area on the freeway. It is now once again a beautiful forest, not the giant trees of the past of course, but it is still beautiful. My wife, viewing the same area would not realize at all that I was once part of its destruction. She would not be able to tell just by looking that these trees were indeed just a new landscape repaired by nature.

Let’s follow the logs from whence they came to their destination, the mill and then on to the consumer. Most all of the lumber went to the larger towns and cities. Some would be built into houses that would provide shelter and warmth for our ever growing population. Some would find a use of some other utility; all would serve a purpose to benefit our lives.

What do we see now, where that same lumber made its final home? Made from a big tree still standing yet fifty years ago? Some would be seen in a nice neighborhood or a subdivision, still very nice, yet beginning to show a little age. Some might be in apartment dwellings, some very nice, others, already a slum. Some of this lumber would be in city buildings whose land beneath were totally cleared of all natural trees and vegetation to make room for their foundations. How long will it take for the land in these cities to return to its natural beginnings? How long before a forest will be allowed to emerge from those city streets? “Most likely never”, I say, yet old forests will be logged to supply our needs and new forests will grow to be logged again.

The time has come for the logger to regard the environment and conservation as very important. It’s time also that those who live in the cities and towns do the same. It’s time that our city brothers and sisters all share in cleaning up their environment as well. We could all quit buying that junk that ends up in the landfill shortly after its purchase which only brought satisfaction for a very, very short time. Pick up that plastic that gags the fish of the oceans and chokes the very beauty out of our land! Caring for our environment begins one person at a time. Even a child can help by cleaning his room.

Yes, a very small percentage of our people understand what it is like to be or have been a logger but may there ever be forests and loggers who supply our building needs.