Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
highway truck throws up its gears after a few bouts in
the woods. An ex-garbage truck, that anonymously
dependable remover of things foul, also turns mean
under a shifting load of logs. The most docile flatbed
rolling will seem to leap at stumps, mud holes, and
precipices as soon as you declare your intention of
burdening it with logs.
Have your logs hauled. You can get yourself killed
suddenly, and of course permanently, fooling around
with tons of loaded logs. Don't even help unload.
Arrange to be gone when the logs are delivered, or find
a pressing chore out of sight.
Still not convinced? Still eager to pit your mite
of might against the timber (cutting, skidding, load-
ing, hauling, unloading)? Then you've got a real ego
problem.
I'll relate a simple logging trip from one of our log
house jobs. You'll notice right off that I never take my
own advice. But just keep your eye on the point, not
the inconsistencies.
A load of cabin logs to be hewn and some sawed overhead beams and
rafters for a new hewn-log house under construction.
A Logging Tale
Three of us set out for a stand of near-perfect trees
some 85 miles from the site (too far) and over 100
miles from our homes (entirely too far). We're mini-
mizing the cost by taking a second vehicle, a pickup
truck, that one of us will fill with free building stone
at odd moments. Also, when our 19-year-old White
log truck grinds to a stall, we can abandon it easier.
I drive the White, which after all those years of log-
ging still looks like a garbage truck. My nephew Danny
and a friend, Brad, who's working this summer to
learn how to build a log house, go ahead in the pickup.
It is a July morning, before the heat rolls off the
green flanks of the mountains. I coast down the twist-
ing blacktop slopes, mentally anticipating the careen-
ing return trip, laden with logs inevitably too heavy
and too long. The roar and vibration and fumes suc-
cessfully numb my appreciation of the scene: hollows
absorbing sunlight, the last mists blowing from the
deep creek bottoms.
I have hiked this country and skimmed its rivers in
canoe and kayak in less strenuous times. Now I am
bent on traversing it, against what are usually long
odds, with some of its beauty chained to my truck bed.
Cross-hauling with ropes or chains can load large logs. Smaller logs
can be loaded by hand using skids or with a tractor that has a
hydraulic bucket or boom.
So much for poetry, generally drowned in the howl of
gears over three hours of steep inclines.
We arrive. I regain my land legs a step at a time.
Danny is overhauling the magneto on the skidding
tractor. Brad is measuring and marking trees we felled
last time. They dry out and lose some of their weight
in a few weeks. Clever of us.
The tractor refuses to start, but we pull it into life
with the truck. I assault the fallen trunks with the
