Kenny's Loggin – Quitting School – Part 1

Oct 19, 2022 - 2 years ago

One day, Dad stood at my bedroom door and asked, “How’s the school thing going?”

“Not good,” I said. “I can’t seem to grasp that ‘Algebra stuff.’ Why?” I asked.

“They need a choker man at Greensea Bay,” Dad said.

“Okay,” I said. “Would Mother drive me to the ‘Sched’ in the morning?” The Sched was the plane that did regular deliveries to outlying areas.

At 8 o’clock the next morning, I was at Tyee Spit getting on the Cessna 172 headed to Sonora Island. Bill the foreman met me at the dock, showed me the bunkhouse where I changed into my loggers’ clothes, and into the pickup and up the hill to the setting where the logging was going on.

That day we were moving the steel spar. They had moved it off the main haul road to log a corner of the setting that had difficult access. The D-8 Cat was hooked to the spar mounted on an M-4 tank undercarriage, and they were yarding it up through the brush and stumps back to the main road. I was introduced to Phil the Hook-tender, and we got to work rigging up the spar tree to log the cold-deck pile they had just yarded.

It was only a small crew, as Nories had only one spar at this location, one logging truck (#9), one TL 15 loader (which Nories had rebuilt), and a dump machine.

I was the last guy in camp, so I had to ride up the hill in a war surplus prisoner truck. There were no handles on the inside, so someone had to let me out from the outside.

The settings had lots of big hemlock and balsam trees that grew in this black loam soil, which we called “loon shit”. When we got to camp at quitting time, we would hose each other off, then change in the bunkhouse.

After my shift ended, I got back into the plane and went home. The next day, I went to school and told Walter the vice-principal, “I quit!”. He was disappointed; he said I would have made a great doctor or lawyer. Yeah, maybe if I hadn’t broken mother’s wooden spoon a couple years ago!

After we had finished logging the settings, Doug, the dump man, switched to using a 988 to dump #9 and run a small dry sort. Some of us on the rigging crew got a quick learning experience on how to be boom men from Fred, who apparently had some previous experience at booming. All the big logs had been boomed up when we got there. We had to deal with the pulp logs which were pretty small. I was usually wet up to the knees, but I didn’t fall in!

Kenny's Loggin - No 9 Truck — *Truck No. 9*

After the booming was done, all the equipment was loaded on the barge heading to Port Neville. Bill came into the cookhouse one morning and told us the plane would be in to pick us up soon. Nories had sold the Port Neville operation and purchased the Philips Arm logging operation from Hillis Logging. After being home for awhile, I got the call from Bill to come to Philips Arm, where my talents were needed.

Watch for part 2 next month!

Ken Wilson worked in the logging industry in B.C. for over 50 years. Ken is a regular contributor to Supply Post newspaper with his column “Kenny’s Loggin’”, and resides on Vancouver Island, B.C.