" You're a writer," he asked?

" That's what I call myself," I replied, shifting uncomfortably under the stern gaze of this rugged, old-time, red-suspendered logger. "Well, just don't write - like a lot of those panty-waisted pavement-pounders, that logging is romantic. I can tell you it ain't."

" Tell me." He paused. He kicked a toe into the dust of this small Northern California milltown, sat on a stump, and began: " In the first place, what is romance . It's love ain't it? Do I love trees? No, I destroy trees. What I really loved was Irene, and I destroyed that love also.." and with that, this once proud mountain of a man broke down and cried.

Irene, I found out later from this logger's friends, was not all that exciting of a person. She nagged. She demanded, and most often got her way. Gene had won her hand in marriage by promising her a house, log or shake, with a flower bed, and shutters, that she could make into a home.

The problem was that during the depression years, jobs in the timber were rather hard to come by. Many a self-sufficient, resourceful, 'knight of the woods,' had found himself on skid road, tramping the pavement of the cities, begging for a meal, or the price of a drink.

There was really only one possible way for Gene to make good his promise. Hand logging. This was a method requiring no equipment other than a sharp double-bitted ax, a misery whip saw, jacks, and brute strength. In practice it helped to have a partner, and trees standing on a hillside over a body of water navigable by a sawmill's tug boat. Gene only had the Klamath River —a wild stream loaded with snags- and himself.

They still tell how Gene would wake in the middle of the night, so to walk to his 'show' in time for dawn's early light. It would have been simpler to have stretched a bit of canvas and slept out in the woods, but Irene much preferred the comfort of Ma Isaacson's boarding house. This is how it was that Gene stomped out twelve miles of tracks day after day in mud, dust, slush, and snow.