Stacking Wood
Bob is my wood guy. He’s 84 years old and drives 1991 Nissan Datsun pickup that has more character than all the protagonists combined in David Baldacci’s catalogue. Bob, too, is a character. He’s spry for his years. He’s beat cancer twice, outlived his wife, his four sons, and still likes his whiskey. Bob’s got his politics but doesn’t vote because “this damn democracy is nothing but a racket!” Despite his age, and the condition of his truck, he still makes all his wood deliveries. Granted, you probably won’t see Bob or his Datsun anywhere on the I-5. By his own admission that truck stopped being road legal on about 5 years ago. Since then, his route from Creswell to Eugene has been via back roads. According to Bob, that’s a helluva way to see the country: backfiring and gear grinding over hill and dale with a truck so loaded down the bumper raises a full 4 inches once the wood is offloaded. At 84, he feels like he’s lost a step splitting wood, so he’s got a helper now. Bob pays him a fair wage, just enough to “keep him in the beer and out of the liquor so as to avoid trouble with women and the law.” But Bob likes to make the deliveries himself. According to him, that’s his signature of customer service.
A few weeks ago, I had to give Bob a call. My wood supply was getting low for the coming winter. The Oregon ash that I cut down a while back is finally running a little thin. I figured, with fall about half way done, and the leaves still on the trees I still had some room for a wood stacking, splitting, and kindling chopping kind of weekend. Sure, it’d cost me a fishing trip but the price in fish is more than compensated by the reduction in heating bills.
Calling Bob on the phone is it’s own kind of adventure. I’m not saying he’s deaf, but the man can barely hear when you’re shouting right next to him. And, like all crotchety old men, he has a habit of not listening through to the end of what you're saying before he’s going to start saying. Further, Bob doesn’t have a smart phone. He’s got a landline and a dumb phone. That means you had better have the fastest directions from the intersection of Chambers and West 18th to your house memorized—I mean turn-by-turn directions with the number of stop lights and prominent landmarks along the way just in case. After about 30 minutes on the phone, complete with repeats, slowdowns, confirmed spellings, and a trip down memory lane involving a young gal he used to run around with from the Friends Church at the stop light where you make the left into my neighborhood, he set my delivery for two days time. Grand total: $250 ‘cause Bob doesn’t want folks to be cold in the winter if he can help.
On the day of my delivery, I had an afternoon float on the McKenzie booked and told Bob the earlier the better. On instinct and a little intel from Jason I supposed Bob would most likely be on the early side of 9am. That was fine with me. I had already been up for a while doing what any self respecting writer and fishing guide does when winter is coming: whoring myself out for work and praying my dude for the day would turn out to be a good tipper. I heard Bob’s truck rattle past my house around 8am. I knew it was his because at the first sound of a gears grinding, I looked out the window to see that 1991 Datsun coming up the street so loaded down I couldn’t decide if it was a modern miracle or a public safety hazard. After about 30 seconds of him not coming back (I figured he was going up the street to turn around and get a down hill run at my place), I called to let him know he’d missed me. With just a little more directions, the naming of a few more landmarks, and the promise that I would stand out front and wave him down, Bob made it safely to my front yard.
We offloaded the wood together. I told him it didn’t matter what the pile looked like coming out of his truck because my plan was to sort it, split it, and re-stack it over the weekend. While working, we chatted. It came out that we’re both veterans. But he doesn’t mess around with that government nonsense because they know too much already. After our tinfoil VA talk, we moved to safer topics—namely hunting and fishing. At one time, Bob was a fishing and hunting guide out in the coast range. When he wasn’t logging, he was guiding elk and deer and steelhead and salmon. Salmon and elk and the money he made from guiding kept the freezer full and the kids fed in the winter months. Listening to Bob, I learned all about his guilt at clear cutting along salmon creeks and rivers and spawning beds. About how he hated to see the heavy equipment ruin good salmon gravel by plowing through it and how he hated the silt and sun ruined streams that made them too warm. Bob talked about the one time the suits ordered a clear cut on what was a known elk calfing ground and while the earnings from the clear cut helped for a few months, the total loss in woods and hunting grounds meant winters with less meat and less money in the long run. At the same time, Bob let me know about his worries for our current politics. He’s not happy about the hippies from the ‘60s running the place. He’s tired of crime and taxes and tents cities and the unhoused. He doesn’t understand schools anymore, and has real opinions about who should and should not use certain bathrooms. He gets his news from his own sources. He’s got no trust for the media and little to no love for all those goddamn liberals mucking things up.
At this point our conversation could have gone one of two ways. The first could have seen me press back on Bob about his politics and news habits. I could have flexed my own brand of bullshit experience and education by indicting the tin foil hat right and its addiction to fear and hate. I could have called out strong man politics as a kissing cousin to fascism, and let fly my opinions on frozen food empire heirs turned pundits. Barring that, I could have pressed a bit harder on those old time practices of over fishing, snagging, dynamiting steelhead holes and beach heads, sniping sea lions, and gill netting across river mouths during salmon runs. Hell, I could have even stepped in some real shit and asked his thoughts on hatchery fish as replacement strategy for the rape and denuding of rivers so many of his generation claim to love with a patriotism that mimics, just a little too closely, the religious fervor of old-time radio and television revivalists.
These are topics that would have brought our stark differences into a generation-splitting light. There’s been a lot of science between his heyday and now. Despite ill-informed claims to the contrary, cultural understandings of land and rights and shared public assets have evolved. I doubt that Bob is up to date on the latest out of the Native Fish Society, the various watershed districts, the most recent developments on salmon habitat restoration, climate change, ocean acidification, or even the so-called conservation efforts of ODFW. I am certain we do not agree on the need for protests, good old fashioned tree sits, dam removals, and more aggressive regulations of commercial fishing. As for politics, nope. Our political common ground lies in that safe zone where we both think those with legislative power are morons whose idiocy increases in squared proportion to the amount of time they spend in office. In other words, if our conversation had turned to the pressing of generational grievances, whatever accord we’d established would have surely died because, while my mother did her best to raise me to respect my elders, no one has ever been all that successful in stamping out the contrarian, flaming beard liberal in me. I would have pressed, he would have pressed, too, and no doubt both of us would have gone nuclear. Therefore, I have found it best, when in certain company and under certain conditions to stick to what’s working and not go and start fighting.
Out of a mutual respect, then, our conversation went the other, more sociable way. I asked Bob about his hunting days and fishing days in terms of stories and lies and women and whiskey and guiding. We shared a few laughs at dudes who’ve damn near killed us and not known it. We laughed even harder at those times we’ve come close to damn near killing dudes and they haven’t had a clue. We found a steady work rhythm where bullshitting passes the time and makes the load easier to carry. As the truck got lighter and the pile got bigger, Bob started to show pride in his work as I marveled at just how much wood the man had stacked that damn truck. He laughed and took to pointing out differences between heart wood and sap wood and pitch wood and wood that needs a little more cure time. When all things were said and done, I had more than my share of wood for $250.
He drove off when the job was finished, waving and grinning as his jalopy roared to life. We left on good terms with a firm handshake and the promise to see each other next year—good health and the grim reaper willing, of course.
In the weeks since Bob came by, he’s been on my mind in a way that I can’t quite shake. Rene thinks it’s because I have always been a grumpy old man at heart and Bob lives that archetype. She claims he offers me an example of what could be and that I am not too happy with that potential future offering. While I think she’s right, I also think she is only partly right. Now, this isn’t a husband’s denial of her Jungian psychobabble witchcraft. We can all agree that archetypal psychology is a bunch of hooey best left to poorly read New Age Instagram influencers. I think my “What about Bob” problem goes a little deeper than a some recognition of likeness in spirit despite difference in politics.
I think Bob symbolizes a generation whose legacy our planet must reckon with for the next thousand years or so. It’s the generation that looked at the plenitude of the world around them and ripped a life from it. They built roads and bridges and dams and interstates. They founded towns and cities and nations. They harvested forests and oceans, mined coal, pumped oil, and forged steel. They heralded the digital age with their petroleum-dependent modernity and didn’t ask about the cost. They made global capitalism a local affair and gathered unto themselves wealth and riches my generation will never know—and some (like me) will never understand the need for in the first place. They built and grew and triumphed and now, in the wreckages of what they wrought, they struggle to understand the sea change in values from their generation to the next and I struggle with it, too. Because, whether I like it or not, Bob’s striving did, in fact, make my life possible. Truth is, I admire what they built, the strength of their character, the courage of their convictions. My problem is I can’t seem to square that due respect with its unforeseen catastrophic aftermath. In other words, whether I want to admit it or not, those generational values of acquisition and triumph have lended an urgency to my values of harmony and sustainability.
If I was a different kind of writer, I might have turned the unloading, piling, and re-stacking of Bob’s wood into a metaphor for the exchange of values and resources between generations. I would have talked about labor and order and resources and capital and ethos and resistance and power and new order. If I was different still, I might have mentioned white patriarchal imperatives towards a settler-colonial paradigm and the long arc of its inevitable demise. Hell, I probably could have stretched the thing to real proportions of academic hypocrisy by bringing ecological Marxism and sustainable cultural legacies from a non-dominant perspective into the fray while strategically ignoring that such arguments are institutionally empowered by the very acquisition of prestige and capital they attempt to indict.
But, I’ve moved away from such axe grinding. Instead, I see a confusion of tensions in my stack of wood. I see a whole lost world where salmon and steelhead ran so thick up our coastal rivers you could have walked across their backs and kept your feet dry. I see hillsides stripped bare, gravel beds silted over, calfing grounds lost. I see the cost of human ambition and avarice. I see the wastage of forest and the cost of fire. And, I also see my own yearning for a more analog life—one where the chopping and splitting and stacking of wood is not just a bit of nostalgia or an attempt to keep down the electric bill in winter but a need to keep my family warm against seasonal change. I see some of the goodness of our labors, our friendships and handshakes. I see the possibility of alliances where compromising does not mean defeat. If I’m really honest, I see in that damn wood pile the whole of the modern dilemma and it rankles me that no amount of burning will take it away.
On the day that Bob delivered his wood, my client for the afternoon was a good dude and a fair tipper. We caught some fish swinging wet flies, skating dries into a mahogany dun hatch, and drifting nymphs along the inside edge of fast seams. Together we floated a river, marveled at changing fall leaves, saw a few eagles and glimpsed an Oregon mink foraging along the bank. Even though it was late in the season, there were still a few spawned out salmon hanging around the soft water along the river’s edge. Since it was a weekday, we had the river to ourselves. Things were quiet in the way that the river is always quieter with its rush of rapids and wind. It was one of those days on the water where you feel a little less of the modern world pressing round, where you feel a little more connected to the land and the waters that we tell ourselves we’ve tamed. All in all, it was a good day and it was another river day that I by accident and force of habit took for granted.
About now I suspect a readerly expectation of some kind of epiphany—or barring that, at least a desire for wry profundity that wraps this over-long rambling up. But, I don’t think it’s going to happen. I still haven’t settled my Bob problem and I haven’t burned through all the wood. They’re both still there, outside my back door, pissing me off and making me think too long about something I should just let go for now. I suppose this is the cost of too much time and hermeneutic tendencies—you’re never satisfied that a stack of wood is just a stack of wood. That, or maybe I’m working up the gumption to invite Bob fishing. The salmon should be just about in. We’ve had the right kind of weather over the weekend. The rain and the wind surely put them on the move. It’s the kind of change they needed—and maybe if me and Bob cast out together we won’t end up empty handed.
