Crazy Stories

[slowp]

I've started doing unit layout. It is a solitary job. Two people would be overkill. I wander about with a photo, map and compass and hang up flagging, then realize I'm in the wrong place and wander back tearing down flagging....and muttering to myself. If there's other people in the vicinity, they probably think I'm crazy.

Anyway, this layout story was told to me.

Back in the days of real timber, real roads were surveyed in. The engineering crew was putting in a p-line (centerline for road location) and they were yelling out stations. They got inside the unit and heard somebody yelling, CLEARCUT, CLEARCUT, CLEARCUT, CLEARCUT and then the noise of a staple hammer. They investigated. It was one of the timber beasts working alone and "tagging" the unit. He looked a little crazy that day. Everytime he put a tag up, he was yelling CLEARCUT for each staple he hammered in.

 

[kkottemann]

man i hear you!! you can get a little crazy working alone in the woods alone. Somedays I find myself talking to the trees and myself for pure entertainment.

 

[Metals406]

The only funny logging stories I can tell, have lots of cussing involved... Sooooo...

Let's just talk about slowp's gradual segue into insanity... Good thing you can't hang yourself with blue flaggers tape!!

 

[madhatte]

On one contract years ago the crew and I all camped pretty close to each other for a time, and would drink beers around the campfire. During a particularly silly fireside conversation one night, a discussion about building a portable yurt held together with wing-nuts devolved (as such conversations are wont to do) until we were free-styling a sing-along which came to be known as the "Wing-Nut Yurt Square-Dance Call". DC wrote it down at the end of the resulting whoop-hollery. The next day, he was out in a cruise unit with his daily Sobe in the back of his vest. Once empty, he had the bright idea to nail the cap to a tree, and put the lyrics int the bottle and then screwed it into the cap. Our hope is that some lucky soul will find out "message in a bottle" and laugh.

That said, a few years later I found a Sobe bottle in the woods and had the brilliant idea to riff Tenacious D, thusly:

Apologies if the humor seems a bit obscure. You know how it is when you're alone in the woods.

 

[371groundie]

doing layout alone always made me batty. i litteraly went woods crazy. my wife said i was a different person. a couple summers in college i was living alone and working alone doing most boudary maintenance. WOW, i was best friends with every gas station attendant i met, atleast they talked to me.

logging alone doesnt bother me. dunno what the difference is, but i can work alone logging for weeks on end and be happy as a clam. its gotten even better since i put ear muffs with a radio in them on my hard hat. only when i work alone though, i wear a different hat or turn them off when im working with other people incase they need to get my attention.

 

[slowp]

Hah! That gives me the idea of Layout Caching. I'll put some kind of "treasure" in some kind of litter and hang it up. The part of a flashlight that I hung on a tree yesterday would have been good for something.

Last fall, after an unpleasant encounter with a logging helicopter, I made it to the top of the unit. I marked out trees so they'd have an emergency landing spot, and left a note saying, NEED EMERGENCY CHOCOLATE. The crew told me there was some, but when I returned it was gone.

 

[Billy_Bob]

I'll be out in the woods and from time to time find beer cans, old bottles, and old bar oil containers, etc. The "regular stuff" you see out there...

One day I was out in the middle of nowhere. Not a place the general public or campers would ever go. And I was walking along and saw a laundry basket laying there. A modern plastic laundry basket!

I stopped and stared at it and wondered what on earth that laundry basket was doing there, out in the middle of nowhere?????

Then I continued along and after about 20 feet, there was ANOTHER laundry basket! This was just too weird!

Then another 30 feet and yet another laundry basket! Hummm! Are the Elk doing laundry now or something? Perhaps a camper left them.... No! Campers would never be in this area..... Hummm?

Then I walked a bit further, looked at a tree, and suddenly stopped and looked again. Is that an electrical wire going into that tree?

I walked up to the tree, and sure enough, there was an electrical wire running up and into the tree trunk about 2 ft. off the ground!

This was getting to be TOO weird!

Then I saw more wires going to trees...

Anyway I walked a bit further and saw a small fenced in area with a satellite antenna, solar panels, a weather station, and several electrical boxes with tons of electrical wires going into them.

As it turned out, this was a "tree research area" and they were researching tree growth. The laundry baskets were to collect whatever fell from the trees and the wires to the trees were to measure moisture.

Now to make this story even more weird... A few years later, I took a friend up there and told him he would not believe what he was about to see. I didn't tell him what, just told him to keep his eyes peeled.

I went to the same exact area and all the laundry baskets were gone! All the wires were gone! The fenced in area was gone!

I said it's gone! I then explained to my friend what I had found there a few years earlier.

He looked at me like I was nuts!

Well we walked around a bit more and there was no evidence af ANYTHING ever being there before. I KNEW I was in the right spot. Then we started to leave and I saw it... A solar panel about 20 ft. up in a tree. They left something!

So I guess their research project ended and part of the project was a "clean-up" after they were through. Glad they missed that one solar panel or my friend would have thought I was nuts...

 

[Humptulips]

A few years back I was hooking on a mini-madill. Small crew, just me and the slinger out in the brush. Now this slinger was an OK guy but he was different to say the least. I would make my layout and get back up to help him as soon as I could but he would be working alone quite a bit of the time. One day I was coming up from the backend and I heard a conversation or I should say a heated argument. I'm thinking who the heck is up there with him. As I get close I see he's all by himself and I hear this dialogue:
" Now you're going to go get that log on the other side of the draw. The :censored: I am! By god you're getting that :censored: log or I'll kick your :censored:! I'll be :censored: if I'm going over there and you can't make me. You worthless piece of :censored:! You'll get that log or you'll wish you had never come to work here!"
About then he spotted me and clamed up. I never did find out who won the argument.

 

[Humptulips]

Then there is the story of Krusty the Clown as he was known at the time in SE AK. He chased for me for a few months. Krusty looked exactly like Bozo the clown only with a severe case of acne. Krusty liked his booze but he went completly bonkers if he drank even the weakest drink. As proof of this he was on the 86 list of every establishment in Craig. I thought this to be quite an acomplishment. Krusty was a good hand but he had a slight mental instability that appeared with the mere taste of a drop of alcohol. This was a split personality and I saw Krusty at times take himself to task for something. It wasn't an argument but out and out hatred of his other half. He spoke in a different voice depending on which half was speaking. I never did learn the name of the reccesive half that only came out with drink but he would curse Krusty and berate him. I don't believe I ever saw the Krusty half speak of or to the other so I'm not sure he knew it existed.

 

[056kid]

I got crazy enough last friday to flip n flame my pick up and break my clavical up on some damn oregon road...