Deep River Read online

  In the distance beyond the camp stood a ragged line of uncut trees behind a jumbled wasteland of mud, stumps, branches, discarded treetops that apparently weren’t worth limbing, and smaller trees, under two feet in diameter, left standing for the same reason. Some of the smaller trees had been hit and broken by larger logs being hauled up to where they were stacked, waiting to be loaded on railcars. It reminded Aino of photographs of artillery devastation she’d seen in a book of Pastor Nieminen’s about the American Civil War.

  The uncut trees’ lower trunks were without limbs and so without knots, many climbing for more than 150 feet before reaching the first branches of their dark-green tops. Before that line, constantly pushing it farther into the ancient forest, was what looked to Aino like a madhouse of wrist-thick steel cables issuing from smoking steam engines set on giant logs. The cables were wound on large drums that looked like thread spools for giants. Spinning rapidly with the power of the steam, logs were reeled in, bouncing and weaving through the slash at speeds faster than a man could run—or perhaps run clear of. The cables, hundreds of feet long, were threaded through blocks, two heavy steel plates holding a pulley-like sheave between them joined at the top by a yoke. The blocks were lashed to huge stumps, providing different angles with which to pull the logs or unwind a cable that had previously been pulled all the way in. Piping whistles, hissing steam, and dark wood smoke billowed from the boilers. These must be the steam donkeys, also called yarders, that Ilmari had told her were rapidly replacing the large teams of oxen or horses that had previously pulled the logs to water. She could see men crawling under the logs, hooking them with smaller cables to the main large cable, then scrambling clear of the logs that smashed their way to piles being collected around rail spurs.

  She saw a small boy standing on a tall stump pull on a wire and heard a piercing sound. She’d heard about whistle punks, boys as young as eight or nine who worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days down in the steep ravines. Their job was to signal the engineer working the steam donkey that the rigging crew was clear and the log ready to be yanked into motion. If they made a mistake, it could cost a man his life.

  The steam donkey’s whistle tooted in response to the whistle punk’s signal and the big cable went stiff with tension, coming off the ground. She couldn’t follow the entire line of it, because the terrain was so rugged, but could see its end where it wound around an anchoring block that must have weighed a thousand pounds. The block was cinched with a smaller cable to a stump that was at least fourteen feet in diameter. How could men weighing 150 pounds have hauled all this dead weight of steel and cable across that terrain?

  Those men were now scrambling for safety, ducking behind stumps, finding shelter in the torn ground, as more steam poured into the donkey’s pistons. The massive cable drums whirred, jerking a log weighing several tons from where it lay, bringing it careening through the slash like a runaway railroad car to the landing as fast as the cable drums could turn.

  Next to the steam donkey sat a railroad engine and fifteen pairs of trucks, square timber platforms with wheels. Once loaded with one end of a thirty-six- or forty-foot log—the log’s other end loaded on a second platform—the two wheeled platforms were joined, converted into a single railcar by the log they were carrying.

  Aino stood there transfixed amid the tooting of the whistle punks and the roaring steam donkeys. She became aware of the constant, steady thump and thwack of double-bitted axes and the rasping of twelve-foot-long crosscut saws as men felled trees taller than any building Aino had ever seen. Matti told her that just one of these Douglas firs could produce enough lumber to build three or four houses. She hadn’t believed him. But now—with each splintering, anguished crackle, when fibers that had held for centuries first started to part; with each moaning, creaking groan as the tree leaned and tore loose from its stump; with the sound of air rushing through the limbs of a rapidly accelerating top; with each ground-shaking crash signaling a tree’s death—she believed. Everything about the place spoke of danger and filled her with respect for these men.

  Alma Wittala had Vanhatalo ears, small, like Aino’s mother’s. It was somehow comforting, this tracing of family through different branches, yet family all the same. Alma was Aino’s height, but she seemed taller. There was a gravitas about her—perhaps because of her position as head of the dining room staff—but there was something more, some sadness deep in her eyes. She’d known sorrow. Aino later learned that Alma had lost two of her children several years earlier to a flu that had moved into pneumonia.

  Aino told Alma Wittala she was Ilmari and Matti’s sister and that Lempi Rompinen had recommended her.

  Alma observed Aino attentively with warm ultramarine-blue eyes that were beginning to have the wrinkles that form at the outside corners when a person reaches the late twenties. “I met your mother once at a wedding,” she said. “When I was a girl, before I left Suomi.”

  Aino didn’t know how to respond. Alma laughed, showing a basic good nature that underlay the hint of sorrow.

  “In America, you can talk to your elders, even if you don’t know them,” she said. “Show me your hands.”

  It was the first time Aino was grateful for all the work at Ilmahenki and Ullakko’s. “I’m a good worker,” she said. “I’m healthy, too.” She hesitated. “I rarely get tired.”

  Alma laughed again. “You don’t know what tired is.”

  After a few hard questions, some of which Aino answered by what might graciously be called stretching the truth, Alma took her to meet the head cook, a small man missing one arm, who seemed too busy to talk to her.

  “She’s from my home place,” Alma said. “We’re related. Her brothers are hard workers.”

  The cook grunted. “If it’s OK with Reder, it’s OK with me.”

  Alma took Aino back outside. “The cook’s the king,” she said. “And his two assistants are princes, but I’m the queen. Do you understand?” Aino nodded.

  “We’re the most important part of Reder Logging. If the food’s bad, the loggers leave. If the food’s good, we get the best loggers.”

  “Why not just pay more?”

  Alma gave her a steely look. “Reder pays what everyone pays.”

  Aino thought now was not the time to talk economics.

  Alma made a nod toward the bunkhouses. “Loggers will put up with lice in the bunkhouses, shit two feet from the door, and work that you and I wouldn’t do, couldn’t do, for ten minutes.” She nodded at the cookshack behind her. “But if they get bad pancakes or soggy pies, they’ll quit.” She napped her fingers. “Just like that.”

  Aino nodded.

  “What we do here can make or break Reder Logging.”

  Aino nodded again.

  “Come on then, let’s meet the big boss.”

  Alma led her past four hanging hog carcasses, explaining that they were tomorrow’s bacon and pork stew. She also pointed out with pride that they weren’t too fat. If they were fat, that would mean that they were eating too many scraps, which meant that the loggers weren’t eating all the food and the cooking was bad. She led Aino along a muddy path, dodging slash and stumps, to a small, rough office set next to the dining hall. She entered without knocking. A large rangy man looked up. He was indistinguishable from the loggers in both clothing and demeanor, with hands so big Aino could barely see the pencil he was using. He did not fit Aino’s idea of a capitalist owner, a fat man wearing a suit eating in a fancy club. He looked like a workingman, not the enemy.

  She soon learned that John Reder had immigrated to America from Holland when he was sixteen and went to work in the woods of Michigan, saving every penny. At age twenty-four, he had enough money to buy two axes and two saws. Being able to provide his own capital, he bargained to be paid by the trees cut and bucked, not by the day. By age thirty he employed forty loggers and life was good—until Michigan ran out of trees.

  He’d always discounted what he heard of the forests of the Pacific Northwest, but a tr
ain ride west in the late 1880s changed his mind. He sold everything he owned, came to the lower Columbia River, and by 1906 had more than doubled the size of his Michigan outfit.

  Aino noticed a single gold band on his left ring finger.

  Alma did the talking in English, most of it too fast for Aino to follow.

  “She speak English?” Reder asked after Alma had finished.

  Aino immediately chimed in: “Yoh, sure. Good English for verking.”

  Reder grunted. “Know … her?”

  “I know … brothers … Matti … Ilmari Koski … blacksmith … Lempi Rompinen.”

  “Vouch for her?”

  “She’s family.”

  Reder grunted a short sign of approval. He turned to Aino and said with a Dutch accent, slowly, so she’d understand him: “Alma vouches for you … honest … Matt … good worker.” He had raised his voice, as if that would make him better understood, irritating Aino.

  Reder turned to Alma. “She … fifty cents a day … other girls. We … fresh straw? She works … bed later. All she can eat … other Sunday off.”

  Reder went back to his neatly printed columns of numbers without even a grunt of farewell.

  Walking back to the dining hall, happy and relieved that she had been hired, Aino listened as Alma translated what Reder had said. She’d get fifty cents a day. She’d live with the other girls in what was called in English the henhouse and sleep on the floor on straw. She was on trial for two weeks. If she worked out, they’d get her a bed with sheets and blankets. One hundred loggers ate every day, so she’d get every other Sunday off. The girls were good about trading shifts if something came up. After the tables were cleared, she would sit down with the rest of the girls and eat as much as she wanted. There was a tub just behind the henhouse with canvas walls for privacy. Before dances, the girls could bring hot water from the kitchen for a single shared bath—in order of seniority.

  Matti’s jaw dropped when he saw Aino waiting on the tables that night. It pleased her greatly.

  “Does Ilmari know?” he asked.

  “I only left this morning.”

  “You need to get word to him. He’ll be upset.”

  “Why? I’ve landed a good job.”

  Matti looked at her, then said, “Just get a note to him. It’s the right thing to do.”

  * * *

  Work at Reder’s Camp turned out to be the hardest, most unforgiving work Aino had ever done—and she was used to hard work. She and the other three girls were up in the dark, even in summer. She mixed pancake batter, cut bacon, cracked eggs, made coffee, or frantically tried to keep up her end of an assembly line making dozens and dozens of sandwiches: beef, ham, peanut butter, fried egg, leftover meat loaf, chicken, salmon.

  At 5:15 a.m., the steam whistle on the train woke the men. The fireman had been tending the fire in the boiler, getting the steam up, since 4:30. At 5:30, the dining hall filled with men of all types, mostly young, mostly Scandinavian, but Irish, Slovaks, Scots, and Americans as well. Their wiry bodies had the stamina of distance runners combined with the nimbleness of dancers—and an astonishing capacity for food. They focused on eating; save for the occasional “Pass the butter,” no one talked. They devoured pancakes stacked eight or nine inches high slathered with butter, syrup, and molasses; put down bowls of oatmeal drowned in cream; consumed plates of eggs, bacon, and ham; ate beans cooked in a sweet tomato sauce for breakfast; and emptied six ten-gallon coffeepots, all in about twenty minutes. She never had time to say more than a few words to Matti.

  After breakfast, the dining hall empty, Aino would watch the loggers clamber into the predawn light, still not talking, the spikes on their boots chewing at the heavy plank floor. Within minutes she would hear the first shrills of the whistle punks, the clattering of steam donkeys, the singing of steel cables running through blocks and winding onto and off the huge steam-driven drums, and the rending crash of fallen giants whose deaths she could feel through her feet. Those working more than a mile from the mess hall carried sandwiches of dark heavy bread she and the other flunkies had prepared scant hours earlier. The rest would walk in for lunch.

  She would stare at hundreds of dishes and coffee cups, greasy grills on huge woodstoves stretching more than ten feet. Straining to move huge pots of boiling water, pouring the water into sinks, tossing in soap whittled into flakes from one-pound cakes, she would scrub, while other girls, her seniors by hiring date, dried and restacked.

  Her hands grew red with the heat and harsh soap, but she had no time to worry about that. Prep work began immediately with wood to haul for the afternoon cooking of the evening meal; vegetables to chop for stew; onions to chop for pounds of meat loaf; massive amounts of dried beans to be boiled soft; salmon to butcher for stew or frying; hogs to gut, skin, hang to bleed, and then butcher; dough to knead for bread, for pies, for cobbler, for dumplings; cream brought up the rail tracks from places like Ullakko’s to churn into butter; buttermilk to be mixed with flour and baking soda to make pancakes; and always the constant fight to use the cream, meat, and vegetables before they went bad. Nothing could be kept; there was no ice. Leftovers were never a problem.

  Just before dark the locust horde of a hundred men once more descended on the dining hall, some shouting, some quiet, some sullen, some happy—all hungry. Men would shovel six or seven pork chops onto their plates from brimming platters, or three twelve-ounce steaks when beef was served, to be followed by mashed potatoes into which they stirred honey or smashed tablespoonsful of butter. Some nights there would be oysters from Willapa Bay. Other nights there would be thick clam chowder. Cabbage and beets were the main dinner vegetables, because it was fall. They would change to turnips and rutabagas in the winter. The twenty double loaves of bread they’d baked that morning would all be gone by the end of supper, along with the two hundred doughnuts and thirty apple pies.

  In about twenty minutes, the huge coffee urns drained, milk pitchers emptied, meat platters left with only traces of grease, the dining hall again would be deserted. Under kerosene lamps the girls washed and put away the hundreds of plates, cups, and bowls, and set the tables for breakfast. Then there would be the mixing of pancake batter, the carving of bacon slices from large sides, the walking in of the huge metal milk cans full of cream, the loading of the empties back on the railcars, and, finally, the staggering to the henhouse. There, the girls stripped to their underwear and collapsed into bed, Aino onto straw on the floor.

  Once a week, Aino got her bath after all the others. She distracted herself by doing the math comparing the surface area of her body with the volume of the water, assuring herself that despite the increasingly browner water there was still a chance she’d come out cleaner than she’d gone in. She yearned for a sauna.

  Two weeks passed, and Alma told Aino she was on for good. The promised bed showed up on the back of an empty railcar. She felt a little guilty knowing she got the bed because she was a girl, while the loggers had no beds and slept in three-bunk stacks, on planks covered with straw. She got past that the first night.

  All this time, she watched for Jouka. She’d get glimpses of him, usually silently shoveling in food as if it were his first meal in a week and his last one for the week to come, but occasionally she’d see him talking and joking with friends outside the bunkhouse in the brief time between dinner and sleep. He was clearly popular. His mother had been pregnant with him when she came from Finland, so he was a citizen and spoke fluent English. She learned he was a faller. That meant skilled with an ax, being able to swing it left- and right-handed, striking every two seconds alternating with another faller, both balancing on springboards wedged into the tree ten feet above the ground. Each stroke had to fall precisely where intended, taking off the maximum chip of wood, the undercut formed perfectly to fell the tree exactly where desired. That went on all day without a stop except twenty minutes for lunch, from dark to dark, six days a week. A typical logger was less than six feet tall. A typical Douglas fir towered
over two hundred feet and not infrequently more than three hundred feet above him, ranging in diameter from eight to twenty feet. If the tree didn’t go where intended or if it twisted when it started to fall and a faller wasn’t quick enough, the faller died.

  It amazed Aino that the loggers not only ignored the danger but seemed proud to ignore it, relying on their skill and stamina to win a daily wager against death or maiming—all for about twenty cents an hour. But men did what was expected of them or they weren’t men. It was that simple.

  * * *

  Aino’s first Sunday off, June 24, 1906, was the day Pastor Hoikka came from Astoria to consecrate Ilmari’s church. Hoikka installed the church council, with Ilmari as president. The congregation had decided to combine the consecration with the traditional Midsummer’s Eve celebration, which that year would have fallen on Thursday. They’d prepared a huge bonfire in front of the church. Grumbling that she was doing it only because Ilmari was her brother and she never had time to see him otherwise, Aino attended.

  Ilmari was polite, but distant. When Ullakko and his children arrived, he immediately approached them, leaving Aino by herself. When Ilmari reached him, Ullakko looked over at Aino. She smiled. He forced a smile back. His children came running to her. Her smile for them was not forced, but she felt little joy.

  When Pastor Hoika performed the ceremony, Aino found herself proud of what Ilmari had accomplished. Lempi and the other girls from the henhouse had also come. Afterward, all the girls walked to the dance in Knappton, occasionally looking back at the towering fire, the sparks rising into the evening sky. It made Aino homesick.