woodbooga
cords of mystic memory
The column below was written by John Harrigan, a longtime newspaperman who lives in Colebrook, NH - a small town a short distance from the Canadian border on the Conn. River. He writes frequently about his OWB, forestry, raising sheep. Enjoy!
“Forest Notes” is the quarterly magazine published by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, one of the nation’s oldest conservation organizations (founded in 1904). Anyone who owns land or is just plain interested in the landscape should belong to this outfit, if only for the magazine,which is superb.
While the Forest Society is about saving land from fragmentation and development, it is also about forestry and the harvesting of wood. A large percentage of its members are actual foresters, farmers, loggers and timber processors. At various in-house meetings and annual social and fund-raising events, they rub elbows with fellow members from the scientific, academic and philanthropic communities.
Thus we have an organization pooling the backgrounds, talents and goals of people who not only care about the long-term health and beauty of the landscape, but also work the land (for a look at what the SPNHF is all about, go to its Web site at forestsociety.org). Education director Dave Anderson does some fine resource- based writing and photography for the magazine, as well as for the Union Leader and other major media outlets.
In a society seemingly obsessed with opening new shopping malls and adding more lanes to turnpikes, not to mention breathless announcements of new developments, there is a great hunger for stories and features on anything to do with the outdoors -living on the land, recreating on the land, working on the land. There is a dearth of this kind of stuff in a Big Media increasingly driven by all things asphalt.
We don’t see all that much in print or on television about loggers, for instance. Too many people seem to take loggers and logging and the myriad products they produce for granted. These are the people who are up at four in the morning to head into the woods, and struggle to keep equipment going at 30 below zero. And they’re working at one of the deadliest occupations in the land, right there with mining and commercial fishing.
Now, I consider myself a logger,but would never stand up in front of a group and call myself that. Oh, I’ve got a good-sized tractor equipped with cables and chains, and festooned with the accouterments anyone needs or should have to get the wood out, chainsaw, pulp-hook, cantdog, ear and eye protection, helmet and safety chaps. But my logging consists of going into the woods for a tree or two now and then, to be sure, but mostly of going up to my log-yarding area a quarter-mile up the road to hook on to two or three trees among the hundred or so hauled out of my woodlot every spring by a neighbor with a big skidder. These I drag down the town road and alongside the outdoor furnace and cut up into threefoot sections, to rest where they fall until I hook onto one end with a pulp-hook and throw them into the firebox. This, along with clearing blowdowns along various fencelines, constitutes my logging.
Thus I have nothing but respect for people who log full-time.They are proud and hard-working people who tend to care deeply about the land and the future of the forest, and are constantly striving for the utmost safety possible. And indeed, the turn toward cab-protected harvesting and logger training and education have done much to lower the accident rates.
Still, it’s one very dangerous business. I’ve had one very close call with a chainsaw, a quirky event that I could never have foreseen, and I’ve seen one neighbor killed and another seriously injured. The close call came when the tip of my saw, going full bore on a pile of trees I was cutting up in the yard, struck a hidden yellow birch where a big limb had been cut off. This “against the grain” encounter caused the saw to buck back with lightning speed straight for my right shoulder. I managed to lean to the left just in time, and the saw peeled the skin off my entire right ear.
Moral Number One: Always look behind what you’re cutting. But I had, I just hadn’t been able to see the knot.
Moral Number Two: There are never excuses, only stitches. The neighbor who was killed was a careful logger and maple sugar producer. He was logging near his sugar orchard one day when he hitched his cable to a big tree and stood behind his machine to operate the winch and bring the log to the skidder. The log’s butt end hit a stump, and the skidder was dragged backward and crushed him against a tree. The neighbor who was badly injured comes from a broad farm and logging background and operates a Certified Tree Farm. He is one of the most careful people I know. After circling a tree he was going to cut several times, to look for standing dead-wood that might fall, he began his cut. Down came a massive dead white birch limb, which had been hiding in an adjacent softwood. It broke his shoulder all to pieces. Another inch to the left and he’d have been a goner.
In the most recent issue of Forest Notes, Dave Anderson’s fine piece on the life of a logger includes recounting the story of Arthur Cutter Jr. of Warner who, like a captain going down with his ship, went down with his skidder. This happened when Arthur’s big green Timberjack slid in slippery going on a job in Croydon (a town just southeast of Lebanon) and plunged into 10 feet of water in the Sugar River, landing upside down. “The windows blew in and the cab instantly flooded,”
Dave wrote. “Cutter pushed against the jammed skidder door. A block of river ice was caught between the massive tire and the door. “Somehow, Cutter wriggled and fought his way out of the submerged cab, with his clothing catching and tearing as he thrashed through a foot-wide opening to escape. Now out of air, he prepared to inhale water, knowing he’d drown. A last chance: Like Houdini, Cutter followed air bubbles upward out of the chaos and darkness to reach the surface.” Arthur had some experience diving, and it saved his life.
These are the stories I think about when I see friends and neighbors at the coffee counter at four in the morning, or when I’m tempted to grouse about the price of a two-by-four or a roll of newsprint.
“Forest Notes” is the quarterly magazine published by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, one of the nation’s oldest conservation organizations (founded in 1904). Anyone who owns land or is just plain interested in the landscape should belong to this outfit, if only for the magazine,which is superb.
While the Forest Society is about saving land from fragmentation and development, it is also about forestry and the harvesting of wood. A large percentage of its members are actual foresters, farmers, loggers and timber processors. At various in-house meetings and annual social and fund-raising events, they rub elbows with fellow members from the scientific, academic and philanthropic communities.
Thus we have an organization pooling the backgrounds, talents and goals of people who not only care about the long-term health and beauty of the landscape, but also work the land (for a look at what the SPNHF is all about, go to its Web site at forestsociety.org). Education director Dave Anderson does some fine resource- based writing and photography for the magazine, as well as for the Union Leader and other major media outlets.
In a society seemingly obsessed with opening new shopping malls and adding more lanes to turnpikes, not to mention breathless announcements of new developments, there is a great hunger for stories and features on anything to do with the outdoors -living on the land, recreating on the land, working on the land. There is a dearth of this kind of stuff in a Big Media increasingly driven by all things asphalt.
We don’t see all that much in print or on television about loggers, for instance. Too many people seem to take loggers and logging and the myriad products they produce for granted. These are the people who are up at four in the morning to head into the woods, and struggle to keep equipment going at 30 below zero. And they’re working at one of the deadliest occupations in the land, right there with mining and commercial fishing.
Now, I consider myself a logger,but would never stand up in front of a group and call myself that. Oh, I’ve got a good-sized tractor equipped with cables and chains, and festooned with the accouterments anyone needs or should have to get the wood out, chainsaw, pulp-hook, cantdog, ear and eye protection, helmet and safety chaps. But my logging consists of going into the woods for a tree or two now and then, to be sure, but mostly of going up to my log-yarding area a quarter-mile up the road to hook on to two or three trees among the hundred or so hauled out of my woodlot every spring by a neighbor with a big skidder. These I drag down the town road and alongside the outdoor furnace and cut up into threefoot sections, to rest where they fall until I hook onto one end with a pulp-hook and throw them into the firebox. This, along with clearing blowdowns along various fencelines, constitutes my logging.
Thus I have nothing but respect for people who log full-time.They are proud and hard-working people who tend to care deeply about the land and the future of the forest, and are constantly striving for the utmost safety possible. And indeed, the turn toward cab-protected harvesting and logger training and education have done much to lower the accident rates.
Still, it’s one very dangerous business. I’ve had one very close call with a chainsaw, a quirky event that I could never have foreseen, and I’ve seen one neighbor killed and another seriously injured. The close call came when the tip of my saw, going full bore on a pile of trees I was cutting up in the yard, struck a hidden yellow birch where a big limb had been cut off. This “against the grain” encounter caused the saw to buck back with lightning speed straight for my right shoulder. I managed to lean to the left just in time, and the saw peeled the skin off my entire right ear.
Moral Number One: Always look behind what you’re cutting. But I had, I just hadn’t been able to see the knot.
Moral Number Two: There are never excuses, only stitches. The neighbor who was killed was a careful logger and maple sugar producer. He was logging near his sugar orchard one day when he hitched his cable to a big tree and stood behind his machine to operate the winch and bring the log to the skidder. The log’s butt end hit a stump, and the skidder was dragged backward and crushed him against a tree. The neighbor who was badly injured comes from a broad farm and logging background and operates a Certified Tree Farm. He is one of the most careful people I know. After circling a tree he was going to cut several times, to look for standing dead-wood that might fall, he began his cut. Down came a massive dead white birch limb, which had been hiding in an adjacent softwood. It broke his shoulder all to pieces. Another inch to the left and he’d have been a goner.
In the most recent issue of Forest Notes, Dave Anderson’s fine piece on the life of a logger includes recounting the story of Arthur Cutter Jr. of Warner who, like a captain going down with his ship, went down with his skidder. This happened when Arthur’s big green Timberjack slid in slippery going on a job in Croydon (a town just southeast of Lebanon) and plunged into 10 feet of water in the Sugar River, landing upside down. “The windows blew in and the cab instantly flooded,”
Dave wrote. “Cutter pushed against the jammed skidder door. A block of river ice was caught between the massive tire and the door. “Somehow, Cutter wriggled and fought his way out of the submerged cab, with his clothing catching and tearing as he thrashed through a foot-wide opening to escape. Now out of air, he prepared to inhale water, knowing he’d drown. A last chance: Like Houdini, Cutter followed air bubbles upward out of the chaos and darkness to reach the surface.” Arthur had some experience diving, and it saved his life.
These are the stories I think about when I see friends and neighbors at the coffee counter at four in the morning, or when I’m tempted to grouse about the price of a two-by-four or a roll of newsprint.
