Scribbles...

A simple explanation of what the mill sorta looked like...

A MILL STORY…

but first, a little background to help you familiarize yourself…

This is called a Rosserhead debarker.

It’s a newer version of what we had in the Old Mill, but it’s the same idea. The rollers the log sits on are called trunnions. I found this so you might have an idea of what things looked like. Now, imagine it already 30 years old in the 1980s; that conveyor belt isn’t there, and half the bark falls on the ground.

This is a jack ladder.

The logs come up the chute from the river. It’s not quite the same thing we had, but it’s as close as we’re going to get.

And these are log booms.

The logs that are around them are called boom sticks. A boomstick its about 65 feet long. That boom in the “middle” of the string of booms, is four sections; a section is the length of a boomstick. The boom is held tight with a swifter line. You can see one on the bottom boom. Now back to the middle boom. A four section boom has ten boomsticks and twelve boom-chains+2 “hangers” for the tugs to hook up to.

This is a boom-chain with the ring on the left, and the toggle on the lower right.

This is how a boom-chain fits to hold the logs together. You put an elastic band- a cut up bicycle tube - around the toggle, feed it through the hole from underneath, and reach down the top of the hole and grab the toggle. Now imagine doing it laying on the log, while it’s in the river.

So, now that we’ve got the basics down; now that you can see it wasn’t all fun and games all the time — that we actually did work — we can get to the heart of the story, because back in the days of the Old Mill, if you were the boatman, sometimes you worked an hour, or maybe two, in a workday.

I’m going to tell a couple of different stories about some things that happened on the boom. I haven’t written one of these in a while. When I put them up, people wanted more, because they couldn’t believe the stories were true. (Well, some of you did because some of you worked on fucked up worksites.

My mill stories are ALL going up behind the PAYWALL…my friend Murray said he wants to read them, and I told him I’d put them up for him…and my brother. They’ve both bought yearly subscriptions.

I going to give a little bit of warning about a few things. Don’t tell me that you don’t agree with logging, or that sawmills should all be shut down, because I don’t give a rat’s ass about that. When I started working in the industry, there were about 90 mills from here to Hope. There are three left on the stretch of river where the Mill is, and as the Mill was sold to a company of morons who don’t have the first clue as to how a mill should be run, the future doesn’t look to bright.

We did drugs. We drank on the job. There were nocturnal visits once by a couple of hookers — or so I was told. (I was on the other shift.) We had irregular showings of porn movies in the lunch room. We had the cops come down to arrest someone for domestic violence.

I don’t hold back. There is NO Political Correctness, and it’s all “Industrial Language,” which means “The 7 Bad Words You Can’t Say On Television,” type of language. (If you don’t know what they are, Google it.

I’m putting this up so you can decide if you want to Up-Grade…