Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [62]
“I grew up in a logging family,” he said. “My stepfather and brothers were loggers.” He said he hoped his sons would take over his business when he retired. “I get out in the morning and look across the frost-covered hills, and I ask myself, ‘How lucky am I?’ I love what I do.”
I asked what he had cut from the hillside where I was building. He said his crew had cut twelve species of trees: red oak, white pine, yellow birch, white birch, spruce, hemlock, beech, red maple, rock maple, ash, black cherry, hornbeam, butternut and aspen. He named them off the top of his head. I was impressed, and I told him that I had always had some difficulty distinguishing between red and white oak. He responded that the difference was in the leaf. The red oak leaf has pointy lobes, the white oak rounded lobes. For him, this obviously was elementary.
Each species of tree they cut had been sorted by grade, he said, and sold for its highest use. The high-grade red oak went for veneer and saw logs, nearly all of it to Canada, but some of it for furniture at the Ethan Allen mill in Vermont. The low-grade wood went for pallets. The good pine went for lumber. Same with the spruce. The lower-grade softwood went to pulp and chips. The pulp was turned into paper; the chips were burned to generate electricity at a biomass plant in Livermore Falls. The beech went for pallets and chips. The ash was shipped to a furniture mill in Canada. The black cherry also was a lumber tree, for furniture, and again it went to Canada. The hornbeam and butternut were chipped. The aspen went to a pulp mill in Jay to be made into glossy paper. (The paper, I later learned, was used in Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Redbook, Forbes and the New York Times magazines and for fast-food wraps and microwave popcorn bags.)
I remarked that the high-grade wood seemed mostly to be going to Canada for furniture production. Yes, he said, the buyers of wood in the area had greatly diminished. Nearly all of the mills had closed down. He could remember being able to sell to woodturning mills in nearby Bethel and West Paris. Those mills had been shuttered. I did some checking and learned that Norway and South Paris, the nearby commercial center for the region, had once hummed with mills making all sorts of wood products; South Paris had once had a national reputation as “Toy Town,” with the country’s largest concentration of toy makers. Children’s sleds were a specialty. These towns—emblematic of others in Maine, the state where the mass-produced wooden toothpick had been invented—had once been thriving manufacturers of wood products. Maine mills made dowels, clothespins, tongue depressors, golf tees, packing crates and thousands of other products from its abundant trees. Nearly all of those small mills have closed down since the 1950s. The loss of that small-scale manufacturing had a devastating impact on the economy of the region—jobs were lost, wages fell, money for local schools diminished and young people moved away.
Field blamed the loss of the mills on Canadian government subsidies and liberal employment laws in the United States. He is partly right, but the picture is more complex. The world changed while Maine mostly stayed the same: low-wage and wood-rich parts of the world took the business; the buying patterns of giant international retailers favored huge producers over small local ones; and new materials, mostly plastic, became a substitute for wood.
But the land has continued to grow trees in abundance, and some men, who inherited the skills and took naturally to the work, have continued to cut them.
Wayne Field’s crew of five men had spent three weeks at the hillside in October and November of 2007 felling, limbing and yarding the trees, and they had hauled fifty loads of logs and chips worth about $75,000 at the mill, log yard and biomass plant.
I asked him if he would come out to the cabin one day and walk the hillside