In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [13]
One local logger decapitated himself, slipping from a log, his chainsaw still running. Another died when a cable snapped and the loader’s boom plummeted. Some are killed, simply and predictably, when the tree, set loose from its base, twists in an unexpected way. A tree will sometimes “barber-chair”—splinter vertically from a perfect half-cut, catching the faller squarely in the chest with enough force to crush or impale him against the next nearest trunk. Bulldozers roll. An unstable slope gives way and sends the logs, loader and man tumbling down the mountain.
The year I turned four my father lay housebound, a cast from armpit to hip. He had ruptured a vertebra that winter while trying to turn a pole with a peavey. After his surgery, we moved to Lewiston, in with Nan and Grandpa Edmonson for the six months it would take for his back to heal.
Workman’s Compensation paid only forty-one dollars a week, so while my father recuperated, my mother worked morning shift at Kube’s Korner Kafe. I had never seen so much of my father. The smoke from his cigarettes filled the small house. He read every western he could get his hands on, played solitaire and watched without comment the dramas of other people’s lives unfold on daytime television. What I recall most is the card table set up in the kitchen for his puzzles—thousands of intricately cut pieces sorted by edge and color, which he patiently worked into perfect pictures of mountains and wildflowers—near replicas of the landscape they had hauled him from.
He showed me how the pieces fit, taking my wrist in his fingers, swiveling my hand, redirecting a corner. He smelled different—still smoky, but less like earth than pot roast and my grandmother’s sacheted linen. I forgot to miss that other father, the logger who came home in twilight, bringing my mother wild iris, bending easily to kiss me.
Even though he walked with a noticeable hitch and lifting a saw made spasms ripple my father’s rib cage, when the cast was off we headed back to the woods. This time we settled into a small green house in Pierce proper. Pierce was named for Captain Elias D. Pierce, a California prospector who discovered gold there in 1860; within a year of his discovery, the townsite had been cut and cleared, making room for the miners, gamblers and prostitutes who lived, at least for a short time, in the booming heyday of the town. Along with them came a large influx of Chinese workers, and for many of them the West and its riches also held horror: three miles southwest of Pierce is Hangmans Gulch, now a designated historical site. There, in 1885, five Chinese unjustly accused of brutally murdering a local businessman were dragged from their cells by vigilantes and hung on a makeshift gallows.
Placer mining came first, and soon the hills were pocked with lode claims and ore mining, sites with names such as the Democrat and the Mascot, the American, the Dewey, the Pioneer, the Ozark, the Crescent and the Wild Rose; the Oxford, the Klondike on French Creek, the Rosebud. Then came the dredges with their greater capacity to scoop the gold from its bed, working the waters of Canal Gulch, Rhodes Creek, the Orogrande.
My father remembers the early days in Pierce, when the road was mud in spring and dust in summer and boardwalks fronted the bars and the single hotel. Now we had the luxury of a sidewalk down both sides, which the merchants kept shoveled and salted in winter to encourage business. Rape’s Grocery Store and Meat Locker, Durant’s Dry Goods, a beauty shop, bar and the post office lined the street’s north side. Across was the Clearwater Hotel and Cafe, where old-timers sat for hours behind the large front window, still uniformed in black denim and red suspenders, spitting into Folger’s cans. Some wore hard hats. When they waved, light shone through where fingers once had been.
We settled into the boomtown gone drowsy, our rented house only slightly larger than the camp shacks.