By himself he would chop a hold for his spring board, a narrow platform he stood upon to reach high above the pitch-laden butt of a tree. Before cutting his felling notch in a mammoth Doug Fir he would study how the tree would fall. Then he would labor with his crosscut saw, and an old innertube for a partner, tied to the other end. Stroke after stroke, as sawdust fell, Gene would lift the blade from the kerf, and allow the taut rubber to pull it back again.

Once a tree began to crack a death cry, Gene only had a few moments to jump from the springboard, perhaps 20 feet above a steep slope. He would watch the fir fall with breath held tight. one mistake, one chip too many taken from the felling notch, could mean hours spent rigging line, and jacking the multi-ton log that the once proud tree had become, down to the river.

Of course not all trees stood that close to the water. Not all were sound. Some were rotten to the core and had to be abandoned. Some hung up so badly that a crew of ten would have had difficulty rolling it down the slope.

And once in the river, some logs would have taken a crew of 100 to keep moving along with the current. Some are still there, hung up on a sandbar, or wedged between the rocks of a rapid. What Gene had to do, by himself, was wade, swim, flounder along with a log, his peavy ready to poke and pry, to keep it moving to the mill fourteen miles downriver. This in December, January, February, all year long, year after year.

The sad part of this tale was not that Gene worked so hard to try and please Irene, but the fact that she lost faith that their house would ever be built. The government came along with a poverty program, she applied for an office job, and soon was making more money than he, doing practically nothing.

I asked Gene's friends what had happened then. Irene ran off with another, but later, realizing what she had thrown away, she committed suicide. What happened to Gene? That I already knew. Thirty years later he still blames himself for not building that house, before it was too late. It was as if all happiness had gone out of his life. But then, it's a tough life working in the woods, anyway you want to look at it.