In the presumably long list of Jobs You Do Not Want, Seriously, the job of backwoods logger looms large, or should. Why? Allow me to tell you the story of Hal Beek, heartlessly stolen from John Vaillant’s excellent book The Golden Spruce. I love books like this which are loaded with scientific trivia and anecdotal illustrations while looking at what a particular incident says about our culture at large; the best of these is Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, some factoids from which I can still recite from memory.

Also, Junger is purty.

Some background material, just to put things in perspective: logging towns are known to post signs listing how many days the mill workforce has gone without injury, and double digits are cause for celebration. Woohoo! For one clue as to why, Vaillant lists one logger’s typical breakfast: 17 boiled and peeled eggs and one cup of Cutty Sark.

Under ideal conditions, chainsaws function like noisy butter knives: one can buck up a large tree using only the weight of the saw and the pressure of one’s trigger finger. But they will also take off a man’s limbs as fast as a tree’s. Given the right combination of opposing forces, they can behave like Ninja helicopters, and their tremendous power encourages a dangerously casual attitude toward smaller trees. A faller named Hal Beek discovered this in the worst way imaginable while working a setting on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1998. Unlike second-growth tree plantations, which are usually monocultural groves all the same age, most old-growth forests contain trees from every stage of life; in between the giants are other aspirants of various sizes, including hundreds of saplings. As he travels from one big tree to the next, a faller will often use his saw like a slow-moving machete, swinging it back and forth in front of him – motor by the hip, blade angled toward the ground – to clear a path for himself. However, by cutting these smaller trees on a bevel rather than flat, the faller leaves a trail of “pig’s ears” – pointed stumplets – behind him. Beek had cut a trail through a stand in order to get at a windfall cedar about two metres in diameter, and while standing atop the fallen trunk, he reached over and cut off another nearby sapling, leaving behind a pig’s ear about a metre and a half high. It was raining (as usual) and while Beek was bucking up the cedar, he slipped backward on some moss and impaled himself on this living spear; it entered through his rectum and didn’t stop until it reached his spine. At that point, his toes were just touching the ground.

Fallers who have lost limbs to saws and shearing trees generally describe the experience as feeling like a “bump”; the real pain tends to come later. But an injury such as Beek‘s is different; the pain he felt was instantaneous and indescribable. Every motion, even his attempts to call for help, would have been an agony unto itself – the kind that would make most people pass out. Making matters worse was the fact that his legs were already fully extended: there was no way to free himself, and every movement risked driving the stake in further. Fallers generally work in pairs for safety reasons, and it is now customary for partners to call out to each other if they don’t hear the other one’s saw running, but Beek‘s partner was of the old school and he was oblivious; he heard neither Beek‘s shouts nor his emergency whistle. Beek realized that if he couldn’t save himself, and quickly, he was going to bleed to death. Somehow he found it in himself to restart his saw, manoeuvre its thirty-six inch bar behind him, and cut himself free – without amputating his feet, or collapsing back on the sapling or the saw. Then, with the metre-long stave still inside him, Beek crawled a hundred metres up an embankment, through heavy brush to a logging road. By the time the helicopter came, his friends were calling him Fudgsicle. After three months spent attached to a colostomy bag, and another three in rehab, he went back falling.

Hey, a man’s gotta make a living, eh?

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