Both Sides Now Specials Edition Free Preview

RCN Media
Aug 23, 2021
16 min read

Updated: Sep 1, 2021

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LUCKY LOGGERS

DEREK HANEBURY

NO SENSE WISHIN' dem into holes dey don't want to go into,” says Curly around the nub of his Player's cigarette.

“That's for sure," agrees Spud and takes another chomp out of his apple. “It’s like wishing your wife into an early grave so you can collect the insurance. It’s bound to bring you bad luck.” He chews thoughtfully for a few moments looking down over the slope below them to where a layer of white fog obscures the Ash River Valley. “If you're feeling lucky, we could try to drop it down between those two hemlock over there,” he says nodding down the slope about fifty feet away where two giant trees stand gleaming in the sunlight.

“Five bucks says we can do it,” says Curly.

The two-man saw putts away at their feet, warming up with the choke half closed now or half open depending on how you want to look at it. They make an odd-looking pair standing there in the chill September air, bundled in wool and flannel, sizing up a 150-foot fir that stands a good four feet across at the stump. Curly’s a tall gangly Swede and skinny as a scarecrow inside the bulk of his warm clothing. In the two years that they’ve worked together, Spud can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen the man really smile. Most of the time his face looks bland and blank as a bowl of Cream of Wheat. His thin lips usually wrap around a Player’s, lit or waiting to be lit as soon as the next cut is done. His yellow hard hat sports a “ten years accident-free” sticker and nestles down on his brush cut and around his oversized ears like he’s worn it since birth.

He’s a bachelor by choice who spends his spare time hunkered down in front of the TV with a half sack of Lucky Lager and an overflowing ashtray always in arm’s reach. Every year he buys himself a handful of tickets on the Irish Sweepstakes. He won himself a thousand bucks the first time he ever played (the first time Spud saw him crack a smile), and he keeps telling Spud that it’s just a matter of time before he wins the big one and can quit hauling a fifty pound saw up the side of mountains for a living. Spud often wonders what Curly does with all the rest of the money he makes, with no family to spend it on, but he never asks. A man’s money is his own business.

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Spud’s not a betting man himself. He calls the sweepstakes “voluntary taxes” and refuses to gamble a dime on their lousy odds. Besides, with six kids at home, he can’t afford to take chances. He is a short, blonde haired Italian-Canadian with sparkling blue eyes and cheeks deeply creased by his ready smile. He’s the only vegetarian logger on Vancouver Island and is famous for the enormous buckets of food he hauls onto the crummy every morning when they drive out to the logging show. Most of the food comes straight out of his garden: fat, juicy tomatoes, odd-shaped cucumbers that snap when he bites into them they’re so crisp. He even planted tomatoes in a patch of black dirt he discovered down by the Ash River. At the end of every day, he and the other loggers that ride the crummy with him and Curly dip their hardhats into the river and haul water up to the plantation, and by late August they feast on sweet beefsteak tomatoes the size of Curly’s fists.

Spud figures that having a long-term falling partner is a bit like being in a marriage except you don’t crawl under the covers with them at the end of the day and snuggle your way to sleep. Otherwise, it’s not much different though. You come to know their habits and their likes and dislikes, and you’ve got to work around the parts you don’t like so much and focus on the stuff you do or else it’ll never work. Just as it is with a marriage partner, you never know when your life might be in their hands, so it helps to have a good feeling between the two of you even if you don’t care for their habits.

Take him and Curly now. They have worked together long enough they hardly even need to talk. Spud knows the signals inside out already, so when Curly tucks a Player’s in the corner of his mouth but doesn’t light it, Spud knows he wants to start cutting on a tree. Curly prefers to do the cutting without any smoke in his eyes so he can see what he's doing. He’s careful that way, which keeps Spud working with him. Then, as soon as the tree starts to fall, he’ll fire up his cigarette to celebrate the victory of two tiny men over a tree that grew easily 25 times their height. He’ll smoke it on the way to the next unsuspecting stem standing silently in the old growth forest.

When Spud and Curly cut a tree together, Spud has to hold his end of the saw damn near up to his waist while Curly bends down with his end practically knocking against his knees, but they manage okay. If they’re falling a tree on a slope, Curly takes the downhill side and things practically even out. They’ve remained falling partners for over two years now, ever since Spud’s last partner, Everett, had a rotten cedar barber chair on him and slap him in the temple. It didn’t kill him. Wasn’t his time, everybody said. Still, his ears never quit ringing long enough for him to concentrate on anything after that, so he shut it down and went to work in the pulp mill where everybody’s ears rang, and the foreman told him concentration wasn’t a big issue just so long as he didn’t get his shirt sleeve caught in the paper roller and cause a lot of unnecessary downtime.

Spud finishes his apple in two quick bites and hucks the core off into the salal.

“Yah, dem hemlock probably keep her from slidin’ clean off the mountain, too,” says Curly. “You remember dat yuniper we cut over on da south side of Sproat Lake?”

“Oh, I remember that one alright,” says Spud. “Slid right down to the lake and damn near punched a hole in one of the Mars bombers that was skimmin’ water for a fire over in the Beauforts.” (The second time Spud saw Curly smile.)

“Dat one went through dem trees like there weren't nothin' there,” says Curly.

“Like grease through a goose,” agrees Spud. He can feel the saw vibrating the ground under his feet right up through his caulk boots, but he’s in no hurry to pick it up and transfer that vibration to his hands. By noon his fingers will go so numb it will be all he can do to hang onto a ripe tomato long enough to eat it. A little hole begins to open in the clouds below him, and suddenly he can see Ash Lake shining down there placid as a piece of plate glass. He watches in silence with the smoke from Curly’s cigarette playing around his nose as a dark crack slowly cuts a diagonal across the lake. It must be a boat, he figures, as a white fringe begins to spread outwards from the crack like frost on a windowpane. “Look at that. Some lucky bastard is down there with a cottage cheese tub full of worms getting ready to slay his limit of rainbows before the sun hits ten o’clock,” Spud says. “And here we are standin’ on the side of the mountain gettin’ ready to work like dogs for the next eight hours. Some people have all the luck.”

“Yah, yah. You better start playin’ de sweepstakes like me. Did you hear dat story on the radio this morning? ‘Bout dat guy who gots da flat tire on da way to the airport and missed his plane, and den da plane crashed.”

“Now, there's a guy with luck,” says Spud. “Can’t say the same for the pilot or the rest of the passengers, but the guy with the flat tire was one lucky son of a gun.”

A little shiver runs up Spud's back, and he’s just about to suggest they pick up the saw and get at that fir, when all of a sudden Curly’s head jerks up and the cigarette flies out of his mouth. He looses a strange startled cry and turns around and starts to run up the hill. Spud figures he must have spotted a bear or a cougar charging up the slope at them, but he doesn’t waste time looking. He heads after Curly fast as his short legs can carry him. They crest a short rise and hit a flat bench, a shelf of rock covered in moss and old downed trees. Curly doesn't go more than twenty feet before he falls over a log and starts rolling around on the ground screaming and smacking himself like he's on fire and trying to swat out the flames.

“What the hell?!” Spud shouts. “Curly, what is it?”

Curly doesn't stop screaming long enough to answer, and Spud's starting to wonder if Curly’s having a fit or something. When he catches up to Curly, he sees something yellow and black leaking out from the top of Curly’s flannel shirt, like a layer of molten gold flecked with black, and as it reaches the base of his neck it turns into a buzzing blur around his head. It takes a few seconds before Spud can make sense of what he sees, and then it hits him like a branch off a widow-maker. “Curly! Get your clothes off!” he shouts.

But Curly's rolling around and screaming too loud to hear anything Spud says, so Spud hops over the log and tears Curly’s flannel shirt open. A thick layer of wasps is flowing up Curly's grey wool undershirt. Layers of them pour over each other, their wings fanning in an angry buzz. More wasps are streaming out from under the layer of grey wool. In one motion he yards Curly’s red suspenders down over his shoulders and spreads his flannel shirt open wide. He grabs his wool undershirt at the throat, rips it open like it was made out of paper and starts raking handfuls of wasps off of Curly’s chest. Many of them take to the air and start attacking Spud, biting his face and neck until he has to stop getting them off of Curly to scrape them off himself. He jumps back from Curly just in time to see Curly’s face begin to puff up like a self-inflating Zodiac. The hard hat that is still snugged onto Curly’s brush-cut head suddenly scoots up his forehead and pops free onto the ground where it rolls sideways and buries his accident-free sticker in the green moss. This is when Spud realizes that Curly could die here and now on the side of the mountain in the prime of his life, and suddenly everything changes into slow motion.

The next thing Spud knows he’s tearing at the laces on Curly’s boots, yanking them off, and peeling the pants off his legs. He can’t even hear the angry buzzing of the wasps anymore or feel the fire of their stings. Curly’s screaming has given way to a muted yowling that sounds more like something a badly wounded animal would give off than a human being, but Spud ignores it. He takes Curly’s pants, balls them up around his hands and begins scraping the wasps off of Curly’s legs. Curly’s tight briefs appear to have kept the wasps away from his skin there, but the outside’s still coated with them and they cling to the cotton as though the tiny hairs on their legs are nestled into the fiber.

Curly has quit swatting at himself and instead is digging furiously at his back. Spud rolls him over and manages to strip his shirt and torn undershirt off completely, releasing another wave of wasps to the air. They’re not as thick here as they were on his front, but his back is a sea of welts, and the wasps in the air continue to swarm them. He grabs Curly’s wrist and drags him to his feet. “C’mon, Curly, we gotta get outta here,” he says. He scoops up Curly’s clothes and boots in one arm and leads him off through the bush. After a few minutes the cloud of wasps diminishes enough that they can stand it to stop and put Curly’s pants and boots and flannel shirt back on. Curly’s eyes are swollen completely shut, and Spud has to help him do everything. It’s all Curly can do to suck enough air in through his mouth and swollen throat to stay conscious. His shuddering gasps scare Spud more than anything else. “Hang in, Curly,” he says. “It’s not far to the crummy. Just hang onto my shoulder,” he says and leads him as quickly as he dares down to the logging road below. Twice Curly stumbles in the underbrush and dead branches, and Spud catches him before he starts tumbling in a freefall down the side of the mountain.

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When they finally reach the crummy, Curly starts going from bright red to blue. Spud wrestles him into the passenger seat and jumps into the driver's seat. They’re a good hour from town, but he makes it in half that with Curly slumped against the door, his breath scraping in and out in rapid snores. Luckily, they don’t meet anybody on any of the corners that Spud takes at twice the speed he normally would, the ass end of the truck fishtailing like crazy in the loose gravel.

Later at the hospital the doctor looks over his glasses at Spud and says, “It's a miracle he could get any air past his throat at all. We had to put a tube down there.”

“Is he gonna be alright?” Spud asks.

“Oh yeah, a few days’ rest and he’ll be right as rain. What about you? You look like you could use an antihistamine or two yourself.”

“No, I'm fine,” says Spud through swollen lips. Truth is Spud wouldn't take an aspirin if his head were split in two. In the army during the war, he got tossed in the brig for refusing to get vaccinated. As it turned out, he was still in there when his unit shipped out for France and he ended up a chauffeur for the General who oversaw all the security operations here on the West Coast. He never did set foot in Europe until the fighting was over. In fact, he spent most of the war hunting with the General who had a thing for wild game.

“Horseshoes,” some might say. Others might say he was born at the right moment with Jupiter ascending. Still others might credit him marrying a Mormon woman with a name like “Grace” for keeping him out of harm’s way. Spud never joined the Mormon Church though he always respected Grace’s choice to spend her time there. “It could be worse,” he’d say. “She could be a bingo nut like some other guys’ wives’ spending every evening bent over half a dozen bingo cards, a dauber in both hands.” He even went along with building the cement storage room in the basement with two years’ worth of food put up, mostly canning out of the garden. Sometimes when he and Curly stop for a lunch break or to file the teeth on the saw, he looks out over the logging show, over the acres of broken branches and stumps and scarred-up earth and imagines it all ending the way the doomsayers reckon it will end. He tries to picture the world without the sound of engines or so many people and can almost see the landscape growing back in over the clearcuts, erasing the traces of their hard work like water pushing sand into footprints on the beach. Or else he pictures the world giving a mighty shake and flinging the humans off of her like a bunch of fleas. Sometimes he feels as if the doomsayers are right, as if that end time is inevitable and frighteningly near, and he hopes against hope that he'll be lucky enough not to see it. Grace, on the other hand, doesn’t like leaving things up to luck when she can leave them up to the Lord. She’s a saint of a woman who spends her spare time visiting the sick or helping out at the church. Every morning she’s up before the sun, reading her Bible and saying her prayers.

Of course, that doesn't stop their house from burning down to the ground one winter day a few years later or stop Spud from being back up on the mountain a week after the wasp incident when Curly quits sucking back those Lucky Lagers and watching Wheel of Fortune and decides to come back to work. The crummy gets a flat tire on the way out to the logging show that morning, but they all pitch in to change it and set back on the road in less than ten minutes. When Spud and Curly finally hike back up to their area, Curly insists on going back to the scene of the wasp attack even though the crew have logged all around it while he sat home coated in Calamine lotion, so he wouldn't scratch himself to death.

The big fir still stands in the middle of the cut like some weird monument, and since it’s still cold enough to keep the wasps in their nest, Curly marches right up to the base of the tree and locates the hole that leads into the nest he unwittingly stood over that day when he damn near died. Spud gets down on his hands and knees and puts his ear to the ground.

“She's humming like a Cummins diesel down there,” he says. It’s so loud he has to wonder that he hadn’t heard it when he was standing up. He can imagine the huge network of chambers down there, all wallpapered with that grey substance—like paper made out of ashes—the wasps use to make their nests. He’s seen them before, torn open by bears or exposed when a big tree blew over and peeled back the duff. He even cut into a nest one time in the crotch of an old rotten maple. Thought it was sawdust digging into his face for the first few seconds before he realized he was being kamikazeed by wasps. As he listens to the roaring whirr of all those fanning wings, he can taste that same metallic taste he had in his mouth when he scraped handfuls of wasps off of Curly’s chest. This must be the sound that death makes when it comes for you, he thinks. Or if you lay in your coffin and your ears still worked, this is what you'd hear when you were underground: the powerful electric whirring of dark wings, the vibrating hum of death everywhere, just under the surface. For a moment he feels as if he could fall through, land in a pit of angry wasps, and drown with his nose and throat choked full of their greasy little bodies. Not me, he thinks. Take somebody else.

Just as he starts to pull his head up to suggest they get to work, he smells the gasoline. Before he can say anything, Curly has the spout screwed on the jerry can and is guiding the tip into the opening in the ground, spilling gas straight down into the nest. It doesn't take more than a few seconds before Spud hears the high rev of the wasp's collective engine wind down from a roar to a light hum to silence. It’s like someone has switched off a horrible machine.

“Take dat, you bastards,” says Curly, his thin lips peeling back over a grin like Spud hasn't seen on his partner’s face in two years.

Spud can't help the smile that stretches across his face, too. He stands up and spits on the ground. “That'll teach them, alright.”

He feels suddenly invigorated, like he could work all day without stopping and not even feel tired at the end.

Curly fires up the two-man saw and unscrews the spout from the jerry can before tucking it back inside and screwing the cap on tight. He sticks a Player’s in the corner of his mouth and holds off lighting it. Spud takes this as a signal and picks up his end of the saw. “Come on, Curly, let's drop this fir while we're passing through.”

The area around the tree lies wide open now, and they don't even have to discuss where to drop it. They both know it will go downhill away from them, and they begin the undercut on the downhill side. The saw is sharp and a thick stream of hefty chips flies away from the chain burying Curly’s feet in a pile of ground-up fiber. When they’ve finished the undercut, Spud knocks out the wedge of wood with the blunt side of his axe, and they wrestle the saw around to the other side of the tree. Once on the other side, Curly stands downhill and Spud stands on the uphill side so they can both hang on at a comfortable height.

The finishing cut goes smoothly as they seesaw the bar back and forth through the girth of the tree. When the tree gives way with a crack and a groan, they heave the saw onto the ground and back up to watch it fall. Or at least Spud watches it. Curly already has his box of wooden matches open and is sparking one up when Spud notices the tree has begun to pivot on the stump. He just has time to yell, “Curly, look out!” before the pivot turns into a pirouette. The weight of the branches turning feeds the momentum of the descent, and Curly just has time to throw his burning match to one side and take two strides uphill before the huge stem comes bearing down upon him. It catches him across the back and drives him face first into the ground before it bounces up and thumps back down on his flattened body like a hammer driving in a stubborn nail.

Spud feels the bottom of his stomach give way and for a moment he doesn’t know if he will vomit or fill his drawers. His legs have jellied under him, and it’s all he can do to stand. The valley echoes with the sound of cracking branches as the great fir begins to slide down the side of the mountain. It doesn’t go more than twenty feet before it jim-pokes itself against a stump and comes to a stop, leaving Curly’s crumpled body dragged into a U-shape on the ground. And then Spud hears a loud whumph as the ground in front of him explodes into flame. He staggers backwards, but the fire quickly diminishes to a single torch-like flame burning out of the mouth of the wasp's nest, and Spud knows the ground beneath him is likely all on fire. He scrambles down to where Curly lies like a piece of boneless meat fallen to earth from a great height. He has seen this picture before, and he knows what to do. Spud manages to dig his hands in under Curly’s crushed shoulders and drag his body out straight. He rolls him over onto his back and folds his arms across his chest. The arms flop like two pieces of thick rope, but he knows the rigor mortis will lock them in place before long.

Spud stumbles back from Curly’s body and lands on the crushed stem of an alder tree. For a moment he is in another place high above himself, and he can see the entire Ash River Valley sprawling below him. All the ground fog has burned away and he can see every crack and crevice. Except for the odd steep slope that the loggers didn’t dare tackle, the whole valley looks cutover, bucked up, hauled away. He remembers the day he and Curly came to start falling the right-of-way for the road. Rain fell like it always does in November, another rubber-clothes day where you felt wetter from your own sweat than rain could ever make you, but he remembers standing at the base of all those huge firs and feeling tiny as an ant, tiny the way Curly’s body looks now. And he can’t help but think as he looks over the acres and acres of gouged-out earth strewn with stumps and branches, their needles browning in the sun, how such a tiny thing as a human being can be so incredibly hungry.

Spud looks down at Curly’s face turning a deep gun-barrel blue, his mouth full of the old forest floor, and he knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t help but feel how lucky he is: how lucky to be short; how lucky to have Grace at home saying her prayers for him; how lucky to have never started smoking; how lucky to be lucky.