I was ten
he in his prime then
baseball player in the town league
boss of his father’s lumber company
when I saw him fall
a bitter winter day
off the skidway
in north New Hampshire’s pine forest
the hillside scaffold of crisscrossing logs
coated with ice and snow
carrying 20-foot cut pines
ready for delivery
branches trimmed
bleeding white sticky pitch
25 feet above the Mack logging truck
donkey wheels down.
‘Chee-yup’
the French-Canadian driver commands
The brown Belgian draft
pulls 1 ½ short tons
along the narrow skid
packed snow and ice
a slalom trail
12 hundred feet
winding around pine trees.
In his red and black checked wool overshirt
heavy wool pants ripped stained
snow mudded boots
the driver walks along the rumbling log
gripped by a choker chain to the singletree
holding long reins
feeling the horse’s pull
yelling ‘gee’ or ‘haw’
and swearing in French.
The clouded day
blowing snow shower
muffles chainsaws whining drone
Fallers call
‘watch out’
the thump of trees slamming onto the ground
branches crack like deer rifle shots
as the felled tree rips them off.
Sweat freezing on the horse’s leather harness
plumes of his condensed breath
billow in rhythmic exhale
with shoulders and chest
pushing against the breast yoke
a steam engine bursting through the woods
off its rails
‘Halt’
log’s drag a natural brake
the horse stops at the skidway.
My grandfather retired the draft on his Plymouth farm.
Libby remembers grandmother hitching him to a carriage
to meet grandfather at the station
for Boston and Maine’s north-bound Montreal train.
Father and I would stop along Fairground Road
to watch him graze.
The Canuck and father
use cant hooks
to roll logs along log rails
to the queue atop the skidway platform.
I wait with a log at truck side
gripping a short-handled cant dog
holding the log in place.
Father works atop the raft of logs
they begin to roll
he dances for balance on the scraped icy bark
slipping log to log
he thrusts his dog’s spike into one
it couldn’t stop his fall
15 feet through the skidway frame
to the ground.
I scream
he wasn’t getting up off his back
he shouted
‘stay there’
‘don’t let go’
‘don’t try to help me’
Pressure builds against my cant dog
I strain to hold the line
the Canadian logger springs on top of the pile
hooking logs
reverse rolling them
father crawls groaning
out of the scaffold
to help control the runway.
We release logs one by one
thudding into the staked bunk of the truck below
shaking accumulated snow
off the waiting lumber cargo.
I ride In the Mack during school holidays and term breaks
reassured by smells of oil, mud, wet wood, and metal in the cab heat
to Winter lumber camps deep
in the woods on bulldozed dirt roads where trucks often got stuck
and to north country mills with curing yards
that got smaller as years passed.
The gold bulldog poised on the Mack’s radiator
looked strong and determined.
Father worked evenings
fixing the truck in Charlie Gould’s garage
in the Five-Points neighborhood.
Ron Tobey grew up in north New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He has lived in Ithaca NY, Pittsburgh PA, Riverside CA, Berkeley CA, and London UK. He and his wife now live in West Virginia, where they raise cattle and keep goats and horses. Ron writes, from personal experience, poetry of place, cries and crises, and the world of work. His poems have appeared in Constellate (UK), Prometheus Dreaming, Fishbowl Press Poetry, Truly U Review, Nymphs, Line Rider Press, Bonnie’s Crew (UK), Broadkill Review, The Cabinet of Heed (UK), and The Failure Baler (UK). Poems are forthcoming in Better Than Starbucks, Truly U Review, and 3 Moon (Canada).
Twitter handle @Turin54024117