We didn’t talk much on our daily trips to and from the woods to cut and load pulpwood. (For those who don’t know, a stick of pulpwood is a 5’6” long piece of pine log that’s sold to paper mills by the pound)
There was no bantering over politics on these trips. Not because it was off-limits but because we didn’t care. To a carload of pulpwooders, it didn’t matter what party was in power—nothing ever changed for the working class. What does a politician know about chainsaws, anyway?
We didn’t talk about current events either. The boss thought a “current event” was when a hog got hung up on a hot wire (electric fence).
He didn’t know how things worked in Washington. But he did know how to work on chainsaws and keep them running.
If we cut ourselves with the saw and no body parts were dangling or laying on the ground, he could work on us, too. He knew the healing magic of tobacco and turpentine, so he’d paint the wound with pine tar from a nearby stump, or cover it with a dollop of wet snuff from somebody’s bottom lip.
The boss also knew all the shortcuts to get us to the wood ramp in record time.
He drove 6 gallons of us pulpwooders to work every morning in a pint-sized Dodge with more play in the steering than a mule on a loose rein after getting into grandpa’s corn mash. Thank goodness there were no such things as sobriety checkpoints for cars, or we would have never made it to the woods.
We were six big men squeezed into that little car. We’d already stuffed the trunk with chainsaws and gas cans, them bumping against each other just like us as we weaved our way north toward a patch of planted pines near Clarksville, Florida.
Inside that car was a holiness preacher as wide as a small ark, two brothers who smelled like gasoline and Marlboro smoke, the father-and-son bosses, and me, a guitar picker stuck between dreams.
The preacher could recite most any verse from the Bible to fit most any occasion, and he didn’t mind doing it. Out of nowhere, he’d fire scriptures off from the back seat, and they’d ricochet around the inside of that rolling Chrysler drum like a 22 slug fired at no one in particular.
“You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. Psalm 127, verse 2,” he’d mumble while chewing on a bologna sandwich while mustard colored the corners of his mouth.
Then he’d reach into his lunch sack and pull out a strip of fried bacon and preach some more. “The Bible says you’re not supposed to eat pork,” he thundered as he crunched. “But when you’re hungry, that pig sure goes down a lot easier than a page out of Leviticus.” Then he’d laugh!
He shaved every morning, which made the pots in his face even more noticeable. His cheeks looked like a watermelon rind after spending the night in a chicken yard.
He’d spout out verse after verse during the morning trips, which made the pines at Clarksville seem farther away than they were.
On the trips back home in the late afternoons, he’d sleep slumped to one side, mashing me into the door handle. He was a big man who was either talking or snoring, nothing in between. So for me, it was either my ear aching or my rib cage. Pick your poison.
This crew didn’t talk about current events because we couldn’t watch much TV news. At 6 o’clock we were still heading home and couldn’t listen to it because the car’s radio hadn’t worked since the Johnson Administration. The preacher’s snoring would have drowned it out, anyway. And by the 11 o’clock re-broadcast… well, what man in his right mind is still up at 11 knowing he’s got to get up early the next day to run a chainsaw?
And like current events, there was no discussion about high-stake, Wall Street finances either. Well, except for an occasional, “Hey, can I borrow a dollar ‘til Friday?”
Since we considered New York to be as foreign as a hundred-dollar bill, the only stock market we were interested in had “Frosty Morn” stamped on its packs of bacon.
While working between daylight and dark, we talked little about the world that existed outside the reaches of the chainsaw fog floating between the pines.
Any conversations during the workday were to ourselves, cussing under our breaths as we waded through pine tops, looking for quota and quit’n time. Both always seemed to hide under the last place we looked.
We knew the daily wood quota was 10 cords (52,000 pounds), and we knew how to get there. But sometimes getting to “there” was slick from sweat and hard to grab. So there was neither cause nor time for much conversation, except for an occasional “LOOK OUT! TREE FALLING!”
But we almost always made quota and earned our $20 pay for that day’s work. In 1973, that was considered an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.
It wasn’t much money. But for a feller like me with show business on his mind, it could have been a lot worse.
I could have been playing my guitar, squatting on a street corner in Panama City, using my hat as a collection plate, where donations toward my car payment depended on a passing lawyer with a guilty conscience.
I was lucky because I had parents who prayed for me. And I had a job. Albeit a job as tough as a nickel porkchop. (Taking inflation into account, today, that would be a dollar porkchop)
Every day as the sun set, the oil smoke settled, and the saws went quiet, we’d load the empty gas cans, the saws and ourselves back into that Dodge and weave toward home.
We were a carload of frazzled philistines, more than happy to have a job, even if it meant having to be snored home and then preached back the next day.
