off the pavement / By Peter Starr

My Worst Job

“This confusion and jumble made my job really difficult. The choker-setter has to wrap the cable around the prize tree and avoid all the limbs, branches and smaller trees that surround it. Imagine a brush pile the size of a large house. There’s a 10-foot diameter tree buried in the middle and you have to snake 20-pound steel cables around it. You have to get the choker-cable nubbin through the slash and under the tree and then up and the around the top of the log. Those logs were so huge that the butts — the thick end — were too high for me to climb on. I had to run to the other end of the tree — with the boss yelling ‘hurry your ass up’ — just to get up on top. And then run all the way back down to the cable. Often one choker was not enough and I had to use two or even three 18-foot chokers to get around the tree trunk.

“I worked a couple of days and it was the hardest thing I ever did. At the end of the week I got a call from the rigging slinger and was told I was fired. Later that day the boss called me from the work site to ask where I was. I told him the rigging slinger had fired me. The boss said that it wasn’t the rigging slinger’s job to fire me, and that ‘I do the firing, but because you didn’t show up for work, you’re fired anyway.’ I was the fifth fire that week. It was a miserable job anyway.”

I just called Dan on his cell to wrap up this story and to ask him what the best part of that Elk River job was. I first asked him what he was doing right then, while we were on the phone talking. He told me he was on his quad in southern Humboldt and was just entering some nice old growth Douglas fir.

“I just delivered some redwood saplings for planting,” he said. “We didn’t cut any conifers, instead we removed the hardwoods and will be planting little redwoods. The landowner is spending tens of thousands of dollars to improve his forest to be sustainably managed for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Part of the project is being funded by California Forest Improvement Program.”

He then he told me this story about that job 13 years ago:

“We came across an old tree, a ‘buckskin’ on the forest floor, and decided to grab it for the next turn on the yarder. We bucked it to length, I set a choker, and then got out of the way while the yarder pulled the first log up. When the log was up in the air, water just flowed out the cut end like a stream. It was like when Moses hit the rock. He had been out in the desert and God told him to speak to the rock to get water for his people. Instead Moses got mad, hit the rock with his staff, and the water flowed out on the desert floor. It was similar to me.”

To be continued …

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