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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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January Snowdrops

January snowdrops

The snowdrops are beginning to bloom this week. They are not native to the Pacific Northwest. A cursory search on the Internet traces them to Asia Minor and they were garden favorites in Britain and Ireland before they appeared in the new world.

Here on the farm, snowdrops are thriving and spreading. My mother or grandmother planted them in the front yard flower beds, but lately, patches of snowdrops have been popping up in semi-shaded areas of heavy leafmold at edge of the woods and in the windbreaks. The patches began as little clumps, but the largest is now is close to twenty feet across. I suspect the proliferation stems from the absence of dairy cows snuffling and trampling over the delicate snowdrop beds, but that is only a guess.

Tree invaded by ivy

New species scare me. My grandmother planted English ivy and now it threatens to choke the natives out. A couple years ago, it nearly strangled one of the evergreens in the yard with vines that grew as thick as a man’s arm.  We cut the vines with axe and chain saw and pulled the ivy up that surrounded the base of the tree with the tractor. Dead vines still wrap the tree, but each year the tree grows a little healthier and the damage less apparent.

I hope the snowdrops are not invaders. January needs reminders that spring is not far away. This is an el Nino year and January has been warm, the temperature occasionally making it into the sixties, and I believe we have not seen a single snowflake. Still, the sun seldom shines, and when it does, the landscape is muddy and muted. The holidays are past and spring is still remote.

January Lilac Buds

The snowdrops are thriving and even the lilacs are beginning to bud. There is still a chance of a bitter Northeaster, but the chance diminishes every day. The good comes with the bad. Warmth comes hand in hand with foggy overcast nights and the young astronomers have not had a single clear night for the telescope since Christmas.

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Telescopic Adventure

The sky was clear with only a few clouds, but an icy ground fog rose to form a haze. Not a good night for viewing. Only a few stars twinkled in the black sky, but those few were enough to try out a Christmas telescope.

Twin astronomers, 2009
Twin astronomers, 2009

Instead of packing the telescope out to the dark fields where the nearest Christmas-light decorated house is a quarter mile away, tired Grandpa, who did not stint on the Christmas turkey with sausage-cornbread stuffing, stayed on the deck where a mercury yard light shines on the farmyard from dusk to dawn, justifying himself that this is only a trial run. Unsure of himself on new equipment, he fusses with false starts before he settles on a location for the telescope. Light bucket, he calls it, although its four and a half inch aperture hardly justifies the title.

Grandpa aims the scope at good old Aldebaran, at least what he thinks is Aldebaran, the only star he can see in the limited sky from the deck. He gets it in view, a pinpoint of light somewhat brighter in the scope than he sees it with his naked eye. He calls the seven-year-old twins, who are working on a lifetime alliance with the Mario Brothers to save the princess. The pinpoint of light is not much to look at, but Grandpa aimed the scope, and that is the something, he guesses. The boys come out into the cold, but in their heads they are still kicking koombas.

Matthew arrives first. He grabs the eyepiece, jostling the scope enough that Aldebaran is out of view.

“Grandpa, I don’t see anything.” he said and started to wipe the eyepiece with a finger sticky with Christmas candy.

Grandpa, who was taught to shed blood before damaging a tool, grabs the grubby and abrasive finger hurling toward a multi-coated lens in a reaction that skipped his cerebral cortex.

“NO. Never touch the lenses. Not the eyepiece, not the spotting scope, don’t touch any lenses.” Grandpa’s voice is straight from the reptile brain fueled by fatigue and frustration of a long day with festive relatives. He regrets his words as he hears them.

Matty, who was up before dawn and has been over-excited ever since, starts to cry. He is not used to Grandpa, who is impatient and demanding, unlike mothers and grandmothers.

Grandpa assures Matty that he is not mad at him, but equipment must always be treated carefully. Grandpa walks the thin line between comforting a scared and tired little boy and being clear that Grandpa will be just as gruff next time. Matty’s brother Chris watches and listens carefully.

Mother and Grandmother appear, glaring at Grandpa, and spirit the boys inside.

Grandpa looks in the eyepiece, adjusts the direction a little and realizes that the lenses have fogged in the cold. Viewing will have to wait for the lenses to cool and the condensation to dissipate. The boys have returned to saving the princess and Grandpa has a moment to mull over his growing despondency.

He walks around the farmyard, behind the old pig yard, giving the lenses time to clear. The grass is crusty with a heavy frost and he stumbles over the frozen ground. He walks out to the field, taking in the full view of the sky without the mercury light and the trees that surround the farmyard. Looking up, the gibbous moon shines in the cold and he realizes that Aldebaran was a bad choice.

He returns to the deck, his fingers stiff and his arthritic knees aching with cold, but he swivels the scope around and aims it at the moon. He fiddles with the direction, the finder scope is not adjusted perfectly, and twists the focus. He gasps slightly. There on the line between lunar day and night, the crater Copernicus jumps out, stark and craggy. He has never looked through a telescope like this before, never seen Copernicus as a stark crater on the moon in the farm’s sky. Suddenly, he possesses the surface of the moon in the way he owned the mountains he once hiked.

He calls the boys out. Carefully, very carefully, they look through eyepiece. “Awesome Grandpa. Awesome,” Chris says. “That’s really cool,” says Matty, and they each spend their minutes looking, then they return to the crusade to save the princess, shouting “The moon is Awesome.” … “I love telescopes.” … “Next time, we’ll see Betelgeuse, right Grandpa?”