Loggers Defy Risks : Bold Men With No Ax to Grind

It was 6 a.m. and still dark. “A rotten, miserable bitch of a day,” someone observed from the back seat. The rain, as cold as ice water, swept out of the north and tore through the gulches in great wind-driven sheets, pounding on the van that carried the logging crew up Burnt Mountain and into the forests to begin another day on the nation’s deadliest job.

The men sat in sleepy silence, broken only by an occasional expletive about the slumping Seattle Seahawks, who had been clobbered on TV the night before. They sipped mugs of black coffee or nursed cans of Olympia beer. They wore suspenders, with no belts, visored caps, woolen long johns, rain slickers, caulked boots and carried nose pails (lunch buckets) stuffed with sandwiches and dry pairs of gloves. They did not look young, but were.

Call of the Woods

For these Paul Bunyans of the Northwest, the call of the mountain woods is a powerful one. It provides their livelihood and their manly esteem, beckoning them to an unforgiving world where profanity and friendship are profound. Yet the forests are full of sudden danger and dark mystery (several woodsmen swear they have seen the huge half-man, half-bear creature known as Sasquach loping across far-off valleys).

And however invincible these barrel-chested loggers may seem as they wrestle cable collars around fallen trees and cut and slash with chain saws and bring 200-foot-tall Douglas firs crashing down within an inch of where they intended to lay them, theirs is a job that kills and maims as few others.

Of the 10,000 men who work in the Washington woods, 24 have been killed this year (compared to 15 in 1986), hundreds of others have been seriously injured. Logging accounts for less than 1% of Washington’s work force and 30% of its occupational fatalities, according to the state Department of Labor and Industries. The risk has become so high that insurance rates for individual loggers have soared to $4.45 for every hour worked.

None More Deadly

Some occupations that men spend only a few minutes or hours a week at--such as horse racing, professional football or crop dusting--may produce more injuries on a per capita basis, but state and national figures indicate that no eight-hour-daily job is more deadly than logging. In Oregon, disabling injuries struck down five loggers a day last year, and chances are one in six that a logger’s career will end with a fatal or crippling injury.

Kaye Kelso, the side rod (foreman), was already at the clearing on Burnt Mountain when the crew bus from Addleman Logging Co. pulled up in the cold rain. Though no longer called “Killer” as he was when young, he is, at age 54, still something of a local legend, an old logger who can scramble up the steep, slash-laden ridges with the best of the young. And to him the woods speak in a hundred voices, whispering warnings about “widow makers”--deadwood limbs that suddenly plunge to earth out of windless skies--and “spring poles,” wood chunks the size of small boulders that are catapulted through the air when tension in a maple or elder tree is quickly released.

Twenty-three years ago, the forest crippled his brother-in-law for life, but Kelso has been luckier. Doctors patched him back together after his logging accident and gave him a plastic hip during the year he was hospitalized.

“Course, half my head’s plastic, too, and this eye socket here on the left is plastic,” he said, “but if the rest of me is in good a shape as the plastic, I’m in a helluva good condition.”

Did he consider getting into another line of work after the accident, or getting a job operating heavy equipment in the woods, as most old loggers do when the knees and back go lame? “Nope,” he said, “this is what I do.”

Chain Saws Snarl

Chain saws snarled in the tall timber, and in the pit of the steep slope below, “chokers”--the lowest job in the hierarchy of logging--fought cables into place so that 40-foot logs weighing six or seven tons each could be yanked up the hill, stacked and placed by a mammoth machine with crab-like claws onto Ed Hughes’ waiting truck.

Because high freight costs have made it cheaper to ship lumber to Osaka than Chicago, Hughes would drive to Port Angelus, an hour away “if I can keep the pedal to the metal.” There, the fir would be piled onto trans-Pacific barges, each truckload being sufficient to build a small house in Japan.

By mid-morning the weather had turned nastier. The temperature had dropped, the rain had become hail and lightning crackled overhead. “Just another day at the office,” muttered Jeff (Bummy) Bumgarner, 26. Electronic horns--the language of the mountains--echoed from peak to valley, a signal that a collar had been laced in place or the “yarder” was about to start yanking fallen timber up the hill. The mud-colored men moved as hooded ghosts, drenched and bone-chilled, through the dank December day, dodging logs that swayed on cables overhead, scampering on spiked boots over fallen trees, knowing that the woods have more ways to hurt you than a man can count.

“The main thing is, don’t turn your back on anything that’s moving,” said Ken Orrell, “Keep what’s moving in front of you and stay aware. You have to have your senses, to hear and see what’s going on around you and you have to be ready to move quick.”

Fraternity of Loggers

For just that reason--and because the rigors and dangers of the job are what bind the fraternity of loggers--many woodsmen shun the protective gear the state orders them to wear. Goggles, they say, limit the peripheral vision needed for cat-like alertness (“I’d rather get a wood chip in the eye than be smacked in the head by a log I didn’t see,” Orrell notes); leggings are cumbersome and restrict the quick movements that can mean the difference between life and death; ear plugs block the busheler’s yelped warning, as he fells a tree 20-stories high. (Loggers shout “timber” only in the movies.)

But even a knight’s armor would not eliminate the perils of the woods. “To protect yourself when a tree falls on you is pretty hard unless you’re encased in cement,” observes Gib Johnston, a union official with the International Woodcutters of America in the logging town of Shelton.

Measured by deaths and injuries, logging is one of the few occupations that is growing more dangerous. The union was, to a large extent, broken during the timber downturn in the early 1980s and instead of belonging to company crews, most loggers today are “gypos” (independents) paid on the basis of production--and that creates pressure to work faster. The economic crisis cut Washington’s timber work force by a third, though with demand and production climbing back to near record levels, the smaller work force is still producing as much as the larger one did during the boom years of the ‘70s.

“I don’t think it’s that safety has been compromised as much as it is that the woods are simply a riskier place to work,” said Robert Billings, an emergency-room doctor in Shelton. “The industry has become mechanized, there’s more pressure on independents to meet quotas in board-feet, the old growth in the flatlands has been cut and loggers have had to move into higher, steeper terrain. It’s a more dangerous environment now.

“Even though there’s still a lot of experience out there, loggers will make an error for the sake of speed, and when that happens, they do a pretty good job of hamburgerizing themselves. With insurance rates already so high, some companies will pay medical claims without reporting the injuries to the state so their rates don’t go up even more.”

$30,000 Income

For all they must endure, loggers don’t earn much more than $30,000 a year, with overtime. But that is far more than a school teacher or a grocery-store checker can earn in timber towns on the Olympia Peninsula like Forks--where the high school offers juniors and seniors a course in logging--and generations of men have followed each other into the woods.

Among the hemlocks and firs that stood tall even before the first pioneers moved West, they have nurtured a reverence for the solitary contest of man against tree and become convinced there is no greater reward than to work hard and see one’s accomplishments at day’s end.

“Out on the mountain, every thought of civilization is erased; you can’t even remember what your problems are when you’re up there,” said Roger Addleman, the owner of Addleman Logging Co. The woods took his uncle’s life in 1978 and once nearly took his as well, when two spruce logs broke loose, sandwiching him as if in a vise and breaking his jaw, collar bone and a good many ribs.

It was nearly 5 p.m. when Addleman’s crew piled back onto the van. It was still raining and was dark again on the 30-minute ride home to Folks. Across the main street--Highway 101--hung large letters that spelled “Season’s Greetings” and Christmas decorations of Douglas fir dangled from the street lamps.

“What a mother of a day,” someone said, “but damned if I figured we’d get that hill cleaned up as good as we did. We almost caught up with the cutters.”

“Damned straight,” someone else said. “Wanna celebrate with a quick beer at the Vagabond?”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.