January 12, 2014

  • Bernard's Book Chapter 4

    CHAPTER 4: IN THE WOODS

    From 1924 to 1942, Father went to work in the woods every year, except in 1932. The pay was so low that year, as my father told me, “It wouldn't pay for the wear and tear of my clothing and equipment.”

    I remember in 1933, when Father had a job to haul 600 cords of peeled spruce and fir at Sandy Stream, which was located seven miles above Highland Lodge. Father called Mother to meet him in New Portland. I remember hitching up a little bay driving horse in a sleigh for Mother. The horses name was Tony. All this horse wanted to do was to go as fast as he could. We used the harshest bit on him, a J.I.C. bit, even then he would nearly pull your arms off. Mother started off with Tony for New Portland to pick up Father for a visit. She used a winter road down the field, across the river, at the Pease Place.

    When Father arrived at New Portland, he thought he had plenty of time to get a shave and a hair cut, before Mother arrived. He must have been in the barbershop when Mother and the little horse whizzed by. I don't know how far she went before she turned around, but Mother said her arms got tired holding the horse back so, she let him go. She told me, "I was going right along with the cars.” When they got back to our interval, Father had to hold the horse's head up to keep him from falling down. The little horse that didn't weigh but 800 pounds was exhausted. The next morning Father told me, “Go out and see if your little horse is still alive.” Tony was standing, but his hair was all matted down.

    In 1934 Father was working for Walter Robinson on Spencer Stream. He had three camps two were about 13 miles north of Flagstaff Village; the other one was eleven miles back. There was a C.C.C. road into Shaw pond about 8 miles from Flagstaff. C.C.C. stood for the Civilian Conservation Corps. A government organization that took young men 18 to 21 put them in camps and built roads and trimmed up the National Forests. His brother Charlie worked as a foreman in one of these camps over in New Hampshire. The roads they built were gravel roads not hardly wide enough for two cars to pass. To get into this country we had to cross Flagstaff Lake, which was a mile across. They had a scow on the lake big enough to take a car or a pair of horses. They had to ferry all their provisions, which was quite a job, for they had 65 horses and 135 men to feed.

    They started toting with a pick-up-truck from the further side of Flagstaff Lake to Shaw pond a distance of 7 miles. They traveled on the C.C.C. road on bare ground; but snow came early and fast by the first of January there was over 2 feet of snow. They had no snowplow so they had to abandon the pick-up–truck they just pushed it out of the road and left it there. They had to tote all the way from Flagstaff to Spencer Stream with horses. That tote road had a lot of snow in it and it was trod down and froze. Robinson brought in a big snowplow made out of hardwood plank. The runners were 18 feet long; it had 3 sections one in the center and one on each side of the center. The outside sections had grousers, which could be hoisted or lowered by long levers using manpower. It also had big wings on the side made out of hardwood plank, which could be raised or lowered by hand of course. Robinson wanted to plow this road right down to the gravel so he could go back to toting with the pick-up truck between Flagstaff Lake and Shaw Pond.

    One morning Robinson asked for 20 horses to be at the lower camp at 6:00. These horses were all hand picked. Father said he was lucky he was called on to go, for there were some pretty good horses picking 20 out of 65. They hitched the horses in 4-horse teams a total of five 4-horse teams. Each 4-horse team was hitched to a forward sled. The first 4 were hitched directly to the snowplow. Then the next 4-horse team was put on ahead with a chain running back to the plow and so on until we were all hitched on. They had some difficulty getting things moving because it was somewhat difficult to get them all going at once. They broke some chains at first, but after a few minutes everything was running smooth. The horses seemed to get used to things soon and they could stop and start anytime they wanted. Father told me, “When they put them grousers down and those wings down, we didn’t have any horsepower to spare.”

    In the winter of 1934-35, I had my first experience in the woods with Father. I was 11 years old. It was during a two week Christmas vacation. Father took a job of 2800 cords, mostly peeled spruce pulpwood from the Viles Timberland or the Augusta Lumber at Michael Stream five miles from Highland Lodge. I went in with some of the crew who had come out for Sunday. There were a number of the crew that I knew: Amos Buzzell, George Dickerson, and Norman Keene, to name just a few.

    This was an old camp with bunks for about thirty men. The bunks were about five feet wide, one row over the other along one side and one end of the camp. Next to the bunks in front was a bench to set on or to stand on when getting into the upper bunk. Some men would get small fir branches four to six inches long and stand them up in the bunk for a mattress. Two men slept together with one spread under and one over them. The spreads were gray stuffed quilts that couldn't be washed easily and were outlawed in the middle forties. When I came home after my two weeks, mother thought I had the hives, but we soon learned that they found bed bugs in an old mattress under the bunk that Father and I slept in. The mattress was taken out and burned. They used some Flit insecticide and a spray pump to get rid of them.

    I went back during spring vacation that year. There was over seven feet of snow with several layers of crust. The snow was so deep that when you looked around you wouldn't see any pulpwood, just a little snowcap. After shoveling off this snowcap you would find the woodpile. When you got to the bottom of the wood pile you had to throw the wood out of a six-foot hole. They had to do a lot of shoveling that year. They had a crew just to shovel. The men also challenged each other to see who could slide the farthest down the mountain on their shovel, on their way back to camp. The story was that Ray Raymond was the best at sliding in his shovel. There were at least 3 layers of snow crust in the roads not yet broken. The crust was harmful to the horse’s legs so, a small Caterpillar tractor was used to drive through the unbroken roads to break down the crust, so the horses could go safely.

    I came home with Father, Erving Morrill, Norman Keene, and the horses. The day we left for home, we were up long before daylight. When we arrived at the Highland Lodge it was raining so hard, we had to wait several days before leaving for home. I ate my first Needham candy bar there. It was a chocolate bar with coconut inside. On the way home we passed a farm with a sign, “Honey For Sale”. Someone bought some and I had my first taste of honey.

    In 1936, Father took a small job three miles above Carratunk Village for Frank Nadeau. After finishing early in February, he worked for the Augusta Lumber Company at Deadwater Station seven miles above Bingham. This is when Father was taken sick with meningitis. The Fall of 1936, Father built a set of camps at Pleasant Ridge. He bought cull boards from the Augusta Lumber Company. They delivered them to Bingham for $10 a thousand all spruce. The next fall they delivered some matched boards planed on both sides to cover the ceiling of the tie-up for $35 a thousand at the farm. Father took a job to cut and haul 500,000 feet of hardwood to a mill at Pleasant Ridge for the Augusta Lumber Company in 1937. This was the last time he ever worked for them. In 1938 Father worked about 3 weeks for the Great Northern at Mt. Abraham seven or eight miles from Kingfield. In 1939 Father went to New Hampshire and logged in the blow down from the Hurricane of ‘38.

    In the winter of 1940-41, when I was seventeen, I went in the woods at Ten Thousand Acres, a township on the right just this side of Jackman. Father had gone in with the horses a week or two before I went in. He had come home on the weekend and I went back with him. It was late at night, with no moon. We had to walk in. It was a long way, probably 15 miles to the first camp. The woods were all large hardwood trees. At one point, Father didn’t know which road to take, so he lit some matches to see which road had the fresh horse manure. When we got within a mile of the first camps, we could smell the biscuits along with the other camp odors. I was so tired from walking, but the camp smells gave me courage to go on. Once at the lumber camp, the first stop we made was with the cook to have some tea and donuts, and maybe pie. They seemed to have everything you could want to eat.

    I worked with Father some, because we had three horses and I drove a single horse rig for awhile. This was a large camp. There were about 40 company horses. One thing that I noticed in the morning were the huge hogs, about eight of them on a very large horse manure pile. The manure was steaming and the hogs made themselves nests to lie in. Most of these hogs were red and weighed five to eight hundred pounds each. They had been well fed with the garbage of a large crew for probably a couple of years.

    The main camp was large. It slept probably 40 men. It was connected on one end to the cook’s shack. There was a space between the two that was covered over by a roof connecting the two buildings. The cook kept some of his supplies in this area, things that could be frozen like meat and flour. This area with its roof, helped protect the men in this camp when going to meals in foul weather. There was also the teamster’s shack. There was about twenty of us. Our camp was just a log frame with some old thick canvas nailed to the frame that must have been discarded by the pulp mill. All the other camps around the campsite were of log construction. Beside the main camp and the teamsters shack; there was the hovel that housed the horses, the blacksmith shop, and the bosses camp which was a real nice looking little log cabin.

    The body lice were awful in the teamster’s shack, where Father and I slept. We boiled our clothes every Sunday. That was the only time we had time to do it. This worked for a day or so and then the lice was back again. Father said he had heard that if we put our long underwear under the horse’s blanket at night, this would keep the lice away. We each had two suits of long underwear. We needed one suit to sleep in, so we put the other one on the sweaty horse under his blanket. This idea didn’t work. I think I only did it for one day. After a few weeks of this, Father said to me one Sunday, “You stay away from the camp for awhile, for us old fellows have a job to do.”

    There was a young Canadian that slept in and upper bunk next to Father and me. He was in his early twenties and drove a small white company team. This fellow never boiled his clothes and didn’t seem bothered by the lice. Father asked two men if they would confront this fellow with him and they agreed. While this was going on, I went down to the blacksmith shop where a couple of young men were trying to makeover their pulp hooks. They thought they could improve them by changing the angle and point out the hook. After awhile I noticed that the meeting was over and my father was heading for the hovel to tend the horses, so I joined him. Father told me they asked the guy to strip and when he took off his long underwear, it looked as if you’d thrown two handfuls of grass seed on it. The men asked him to throw the underwear in the woodstove. He did and said, “I never felt lousy.”

    Our camp, as I mentioned, was made of thick canvas. There were two bulldog stoves back to back, that took four foot wood. Of course heat rises, so the men in the bottom bunks were always cold, while we in the top bunks were roasting. I remember one night the old fellow who slept in the bed under Father and I, had just loaded up the stove, when this other fellow gets down from his bunk, grabs a pail of water, and throws it in the stove.

    One day it was 40 degrees below zero, so they said. Most didn’t go out but, that didn’t stop us. We had roads to break and records to set. I didn’t know it at the time but, Father told me years later that he was often hired to “bull the crew”, to shame them into doing more work. Well, that day was very cold and when we got up the mountain where the wood was, my hands were nearly frozen. The steam was rising over the horses and Father said, “Take off your mittens and put your hands up between the horse’s hind legs.” The horse didn’t seem to mind and that warmed me up in good shape. Soon we were putting on a load of pulpwood.

    The landing was the place on the stream where a large area of about ten acres, maybe more, was clean cut and a wooden dam was constructed with a sluice. Early in the fall, they flooded this area and when it froze over, they started to haul on the pulpwood. I heard them telling how they went on it too soon, and put a team of horses through the ice. They didn’t lose the team, but I guess it was quite a sight. This happened sometime before we arrived. We piled the wood on the ice. The weight of many loads caused it to sink into the water. At times water would surround the woodpile. Now, with this wood sinking and freezing, it became a solid block, especially that which was in the water.

    The main road was as good as any highway made out of skids, ice, and snow. At night they hauled water with a pair of horses with a wooden box the width of the road. This box had two holes in the bottom, one in each end right where the sled runners went. When they got to where they wanted water on the road, they just pulled the plugs and drove along. They loaded the water wagon on the lake. They cut a hole in the ice and loaded with a wooden barrel and a horse. It was a two man operation, one to lead the horse the other to handle the barrel. There was a pole attached with a strap to the bottom of the barrel. With this, the barrel could be maneuvered to fill it with water. The top of the barrel had a rope attached for the horse to pull it up a chute. When it got pulled up. it would tip and dump the water in the box.

    In the spring of that year, I went back on the drive, after having a fight at home with my father. I worked as a "cookee" (the cook's assistant) washing dishes and doing what the cook asked me to do. One day he said, "I am going to make tomato soup. Go open those four gallons of tomatoes and dump them into the copper boiler." After opening the cans, I noticed that one of the opened cans was ketchup. The cook seemed to have a hard time getting the flavor just right, but as the men left the table they were telling him it was the best tomato soup they ever had. The cook had two cook stoves with oven doors on front and back. One night he fried steak right on top of the stove, no frying pan. I noticed that he kept a box of baking soda handy. Soon it started to rain and the lake was over flowing. We had water. Time to move pulp. They woke us up at three in the morning. Now we had to light lanterns, get our pick poles, and go to the dam.

    In 1942, Father went to Moose River hurt his leg and spent the rest of the winter in the hospital. Father says that this was the end of his up river jobs. When I got out of the Army in January 1946, Father handed me the reins of a pair of horses and we were yarding hemlock at Willie Hilton’s.

    Next Posting: Chapter 5 Horses

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