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Clearing Stumps

When my great grandfather and grandfather were buying their farms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the land had been logged, but not cleared. The loggers left behind brush, stumps, and tall snags.

South loft, pig barn

Although biggest evergreens were gone, the land was still forested with smaller firs, cedars, and hemlocks, and unmerchantable trees like vine maple, big leaf maple, bitter cherry, mountain ash (rowan), cottonwood, and alder flourished where the climax forest had been disturbed.

Judging Farm Land

Dad said that the old settlers judged the quality of land by the trees that grew on it. Land covered with big flourishing cedars and firs was good farm land. Cedars meant that the ground was well watered. Big firs meant the soil was rich and dry enough for early planting. Those were the rules my grandfather used to choose the acreage that became our farm.

The soil underneath the tangle left behind by the loggers was good, but preparing the land for farming was a struggle. Clearing land was hard work. The trees the loggers left behind were cut and hauled to the the mill if the logs could be sold and burned if they could not. The farmers hacked down brush, grubbed out the roots, and burned all the debris.

Daunting Task

Clearing stumps was a daunting task. If you are not from the Pacific Northwest, you may not realize how monumental those stumps were. Stumps big enough to hollow out and drive a car through used to be tourist attractions on the highway, but in the woods, they were not rare. I only watched the stump era end, but the stumps I remember were a dozen feet tall and a good ten feet through at the base. They were all marked by spring board notches that were at least six feet off the ground.

There were different ways of dealing with stumps. A temporary expedient was to plant around them, but that made cultivating and harvesting difficult and wasted good land. Like his neighbors, Grandpa started out as a stump farmer, sowing potatoes and oats between the towering stumps and snags; clearing the farm of stumps was a gradual forty year project. Grandpa bought the farm in about 1909 when my grandparents married and the last field was cleared in the late 1940’s, before I was born. According to Dad, most of the stumps were dug out by hand and pulled with a team of horses into piles for burning. Only the last few acres were cleared by bull dozer. When I was a kid in the fifties and sixties, there were stumps left in the woods and a few left in the semi-cleared margin around the woods.

Blasting

Grandpa blasted some stumps out with dynamite. At first, Grandpa hired an expert, a so-called powder monkey, to set charges and blow the stumps, but he soon learned to blast for himself. When I was a kid, a couple of sticks of dynamite still lurked on a shelf in the tractor shed. In the woods, here and there, powder boxes were still bolted five or six feet above the ground on trees; a large box for dynamite sticks and a smaller box thirty or forty feet away for storing blasting caps, keeping the sticks and caps apart as carefully as fire and gasoline. By the time I was tall enough to look into the boxes, they were all empty and I was never around for a blast.

The havoc after a blast could be more trouble than the stump, so Grandpa only blasted the biggest and most recalcitrant stumps. In his search for a better way, Grandpa invented a tool for burning out stumps. He bought a second-hand vacuum cleaner and fitted it with a set of metal nozzles where the dust bag had been attached, so that he had a blower that he could direct deep in the base of a stump. With forced air, he could start and keep a hot fire burning that would consume a stump in a day or two instead the weeks it would take without air. John Schaefer, my long dead consultant on nearly everything, said Grandpa’s stump burner worked better than anything else, but you had to have a long extension cord.

Effects

Transforming the forests of the Pacific Northwest into farmland released many tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For decades, there was always a hint of wood smoke in the air and I still treat work that does not carry the scent of wood smoke and sweat as slightly frivolous. Much of the timber that was burned would be used today. Alder, which my grandfather did not even think much of for firewood, is now a premium wood for cabinetry. What is right for one generation, changes for the next.

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Logging the Farm

Like most of lowland Whatcom County, the farm was logged late in the nineteenth century. Those early loggers only cut the best timber, using axes and two man crosscut saws to fall the trees and ox teams to pull the logs over skid roads to the Nooksack River.

Fir stump supporting birch trees a century after logging.
Skid Roads

A skid road to the river at Ferndale ran along the south boundary of the farm, parallel to and a quarter mile north of the Smith Road. I don’t think there are any signs of the skid road left now. Skid roads were routes through the woods for hauling logs. Skids were laid across the road a couple feet apart and greased to make the logs slide easier. Ox teams dragged the logs over the skids. The oxen were slow, but they could pull harder and longer than horses and were less prone to injury.

Dad said they were still occasionally hauled logs on the skid road when he was small, which must have been around 1920 or a little earlier, since Dad was born in 1913. He said that his parents kept him away from the skid road because they did not want him to hear the teamsters swearing.

When I was a kid, Dad pointed out a few cedar logs, about four feet long and a foot in diameter that he said were skids on the old skid road. I looked for those old skids the other day, but they must have rotted away to oblivion.

My guess is that the skid road ended just down stream from the log jam that blocked the Nooksack at Ferndale until 1877. A skid road built after 1877 would have no particular reason to end below the jam, but I suspect that the skid road might have been that old, because logging of the lowlands east of Ferndale must have begun well before then. I have not yet found a map showing the skid roads, but I am still looking.

Logging Equipment

The productivity of the old logging shows must have been low compared to today’s chainsaws, bulldozers, and logging trucks. When the old time loggers cut down a tree, they had to choose the trees carefully. They would not touch the lowly vine maple.  The largest cedars and Douglas Firs were too large to handle, so they left them behind. They also passed by trees with too many limbs. They cut the trees ten or twelve feet above the ground to avoid sawing by hand through the thick part of the trunk.

Springboards

The old time loggers used what they called ‘springboards’. These were wooden boards reinforced with iron straps.

Remains of springboard notch in old fir stump. Fifty years ago, the notch was much more distinct.

The logger chopped a horizontal niche into the tree and stuck the end of the springboard into the niche, then stood on the spring board. If they were not past the swell of the trunk, they would chop another niche while balancing on the first spring-board. Using that technique, they could walk up a tree as high as they needed.

Falling Axes

When they had established their perch on the side of the tree, they chopped out the undercut. This was a notch, cut in about a quarter of the diameter of the tree, that would control the direction of the fall. Their tools were a cross cut saw, a double-bit falling ax, and aching muscles.

Falling axes were kept razor sharp. Chopping an undercut could take all day with a sharp ax and there was no time or strength to waste on a dull ax. John Schaefer, who worked in the logging camps, told me that he once saw a faller threaten to punch a swamper in the face when he started to sharpen the faller’s ax with a file. The faller maintained that his ax had to be sharpened on a stone and would be ruined by a file.

Triumph of the Logger

Falling a big fir could take days of chopping and sawing balanced on narrow spring-boards. When a tree finally fell, it must have been gratifying, a triumph of human will and patience over the massive passivity of nature.

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The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March is the third book in my current Saul Bellow kick. Like Seize The Day and Herzog, I first read Augie’s Adventures when I was high school. It is a Chicago book, more of a Chicago book than Herzog, possibly the best Chicago book Bellow wrote. The book was published in 1953 and won the National Book Award.

Lilac buds press on
Augie March and Huckleberry Finn

Augie’s adventures beg to be compared to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was published sixty five years earlier in 1885. Both are picaresque novels, both are unequivocally American. Augie’s adventures are a chronicle of Augie’s loves and occupations as he grows from mannish boy to boyish man. Huck’s adventures are a float down the river to escape from Huck’s Pa and and emancipate Jim.

For Huck Finn,  the escape from Pa and emancipation of Jim are eventually resolved. The resolutions are not tidy– they occur off the stage, not from the action of the novel itself. Hemingway, among others, criticized the closing chapters of Huck Finn for descending into burlesque. I also feel some disappointment with the end, but I am crudly delighted with the Tom Sawyer camp town humor. However, I am profoundly disturbed by the deus ex machina grinding away in the background, resolving the plot that structures the great theme of freedom that flows through the heart of the novel. The end disappoints me because Widow Watson’s deathbed emancipation of Jim and Pa’s death are insignificant on the mighty river where Huck and Jim are condemned to float.

Chicago and the River

The Adventures of Augie March has scant plot and no river. Bellow sets out to tell us something about the life of an immigrant family on the west side of Chicago. Augie March is a long book (600 plus pages of compact print), that does not resolve itself. Saul Bellow repeatedly challenges the reader to examine the meaning of success for Augie as he experiences amazing adventures, in hobo camps, hunting giant lizards with an eagle, with Trotsky’s cadre in Mexico, but Augie at the end of the book is the same amiable, impressionable boy he was in the beginning. Although the reader has been challenged, the book is content to repeatedly raise the issue without pronouncing judgment.

For many, this is unsatisfying, perhaps more unsatisfying than the close of Huck Finn, which at least delivers a tidy package, but the incompleteness of the endings for both Huck and Augie comes from the peculiar resistance to endings in American life. Everything in America is in preparation for a new frontier and the next deal of the cards; there is no end to Huck’s and Augie’s adventures because the adventures both depend on the next deal. Huck looks at freedom as emancipation from Pa, from the Widow Watson, and Jim’s emancipation from the institution of slavery, but Huck’s emancipations do not resolve the problem of freedom, they only prove its fragility as Huck observes the king and the duke put Jim back in chains, but the cards are redealt and the king and the duke are tarred and feathered themselves. Immigration emancipated Augie from the empires of Europe, but Augie finds freedom elusive, hard to define and understand, and– most of all– impermanent. There is no satisfactory ending.

The Secret of Life

Reading The Adventures of Augie March is an immense pleasure. Einhorn the crippled real estate wheeler-dealer, Padilla the mathematician-book thief, and Thea the eagle trainer all are memorable and entertaining. Even minor players like Clem Tambow, Ten Properties, and Dingbat stick in the mind and command smiles and pangs. And, most of all, Augie is likable, intriguing– much like old Huck. You just might wring the secret of life out of either one of them if you read their book one more time.