Bringing It to the Table (19 page)

The logging crews work the year round and in all weather except pouring rain. The teamsters, who furnish their own teams and equipment, receive forty dollars per thousand board feet. Two of his teamsters, Charlie says, make more than thirty thousand dollars a year each.

The logging arch, in comparison to a mechanical skidder, is a very forthright piece of equipment. Like the forecart that is widely used for field work, it is simply a way to provide a drawbar for a team of horses.
There are a number of differences in design, but the major difference is that the logging arch’s drawbar is welded on edge-up and has slots instead of holes. The slots are made so as to catch and hold the links of a log chain. Each cart carries an eighteen-foot chain with a grab hook at each end. Four metal hooks (which Charlie calls “log grabs,” but which are also called “J-hooks” or “logging dogs”) are linked to rings and strung on the chain, thus permitting the cart to draw as many as four logs at a time. The chain can also be used at full length if necessary to reach a hard-to-get-to log. Larger logs require the use of tongs, which the teamsters also carry with them, or two grabs driven into the log on opposite sides. The carts are equipped also with a cant hook and a “skipper” with which to drive the grabs into the log and knock them out again.

The slotted drawbar permits the chain to be handily readjusted as the horses work a log into position for skidding. When the log is ready to go, it is chained as closely as possible to the drawbar, so that when the horses tighten the fore end of the log is raised off the ground. This is the major efficiency of the logging arch: By thus raising the log, the arch both keeps it from digging and reduces its friction against the ground by more than half.

We watched a team drag out a twelve-foot log containing about 330 board feet. They were well loaded but were not straining. Charlie says that a team can handle up to five or six hundred board feet. For bigger logs, they use an additional team or a bulldozer. A good teamster can skid 3,000 to 3,500 board feet a day in small logs. The trick, Charlie says, is to know what your horses can do, and then see that they do that much on every pull. Overload, and you’re resting too much. Underload, and you’re wasting energy and time. The important thing is to keep loaded and keep moving.

Charlie Fisher is a man of long experience in the woods and extensive knowledge of the timber business and of logging technology. He has no prejudice against mechanical equipment as such, but uses it readily
according to need; for a time, during his thirties, he used mechanical skidders. That this man greatly prefers horses for use in the woods is therefore of considerable interest. I asked him to explain.

His first reason, and the most important, is one I’d heard before from draft horsemen: “I’ve always liked horses.” Charlie and David are clearly the sort of men who can’t quite live without horses. Between them, they own six excellent, very large Belgian geldings and two Belgian mares. Charlie, as he explained, owns three and a half horses, and David four and a half. The two halves, fortunately, belong to the same horse, which Charlie and David own in partnership. Charlie has long been an enthusiastic participant in pulling contests, and David has followed in his father’s footsteps in the arena as in the woods. Last season, David participated in twenty-three contests and Charlie in five, which for him was many fewer than usual. Charlie and his wife, Becky, showed us several shelves crowded with trophies, many of which were David’s. It looked to me like they are going to need more shelves. Charlie and Becky are very proud of David, who is an accomplished logger and horseman. David, Charlie says, is an exceptionally quiet hand with a team—unlike Charlie, who confessed, “I holler.” Since they would have the horses anyhow, Charlie said, they might as well put them to work in the woods, which keeps them fit and allows them to earn their keep.

Charlie’s second reason for using horses in the woods, almost as important as the first, is that he likes the woods, and horses leave the woods in better condition than a skidder. A team and a logging arch require a much narrower roadway than a skidder; unlike a skidder, they don’t bark trees; and they leave their skidding trails far less deeply rutted. “The horse,” Charlie says, “will always be the answer to good logging in a woods.”

A third attractive feature of the horse economy in the woods is that the horse logger both earns and spends his money in the local community, whereas the mechanical skidder siphons money away from the
community and into the hands of large corporate suppliers. Moreover, the horse logger’s kinder treatment of the woods will, in the long run, yield an economic benefit.

And, finally, horses work far more cheaply and cost far less than a skidder, thus requiring fewer trees to be cut per acre, and so permitting the horse logger to be more selective and conservative.

(Another issue involved in the use of horses for work is that of energy efficiency. Legs are more efficient than wheels over rough ground—something that will quickly be apparent to you if you try riding a bicycle over a plowed field.)

Well ahead of the logging crews, Charlie goes into the woods to mark the trees that are to be cut. Except when he is working for a “developer” who is going to clear the land, Charlie never buys or marks trees with the idea of taking every one that is marketable. His purpose is to select a number of trees, often those that need cutting because they are diseased or damaged or otherwise inferior, which will provide a reasonable income to landowner and logger alike, without destroying the wood-making capacity of the forest. The point can best be understood by considering the difference between a year’s growth added to a tree fourteen inches in diameter and that added to a tree four inches in diameter. Clear-cutting or any other kind of cutting that removes all the trees of any appreciable size radically reduces the wood-making capacity of the forest. After such a cutting, in Charlie’s part of the country, it will be sixty to a hundred years before another cutting can be made. Of a clear-cut woodland that adjoined one of his own tracts, Charlie said, “In fifty years there still won’t be a decent log in it.”

Charlie does not believe that such practices are good for the forest or the people—or, ultimately, for the timber business. He stated his interest forthrightly in economic terms, but his is the right kind of economics: “I hope maybe there’ll be trees here for my son to cut in ten or twenty years.” If you don’t overdo the cutting, he says, a woodland can
yield a cash crop every ten to fifteen years. We looked at one tract of twenty acres on which Charlie had marked about 160 trees and written the owner a check for $23,000. Charlie described this as “a young piece of timber,” and he said that it “definitely” could be logged again in ten years—at which time he could both take more and leave more good trees than he will take and leave at this cutting.

Owners of wooded land should consider carefully the economics of this twenty-acre tract. If it is selectively and carefully logged every ten years, as Charlie says it can be, then every acre will earn $1,150 every ten years, or $115 per year. And this comes to the landowner without expense or effort. (These particular figures, of course, apply only to this particular woodlot. Some tracts might be more productive, others less.)

We looked at marked woodlands, at woodlands presently being logged, and finally, at the end of the second day of our visit, at a woodland that one of Charlie’s crews had logged three years ago. The last, a stand predominantly of hard and soft maples, provided convincing evidence of the good sense of Charlie’s kind of forestry. Very few of the remaining trees had been damaged by trees felled during the logging. I saw not a single tree that had been barked by a skidded log. The skid trails had completely healed over; there was no sign of erosion. And, most striking, the woodland was still ecologically intact. It was still a diverse, uneven-aged stand of trees, many of which were over sixteen inches in diameter. We made a photograph of three trees, standing fairly close together, which varied in diameter from seventeen to twenty-one inches. After logging, the forest is still a forest, and it will go on making wood virtually without interruption or diminishment. It seems perfectly reasonable to think that, if several generations of owners were so inclined, this sort of forestry could eventually result in an “old growth” forest that would have produced a steady income for two hundred years.

I was impressed by a good many things during my visit with Charlie Fisher, but what impressed me most is the way that Charlie’s kind of
logging achieves a complex fairness or justice to the several interests that are involved: the woods, the landowner, the timber company, the woods crews and their horses.

Charlie buys standing trees, and he marks every tree he buys. Within a fairly narrow margin of error, Charlie knows what he is buying, and the landowner knows what he is getting paid for. When Charlie goes in to mark the trees, he is thinking not just about what he will take, but also about what he will leave. He sees the forest as it is, and he sees the forest as it will be when the logging job is finished. I think he sees it too as it will be in ten or fifteen or twenty years, when David or another logger will return to it. By this long-term care, he serves the forest and the landowner as well as himself. As he marks the trees he is thinking also of the logging crew that will soon be there. He marks each tree that is to be cut with a slash of red paint. Sometimes, where he has seen a leaning deadfall or a dead limb or a flaw in the trunk, he paints an arrow above the slash, and this means “Look up!” The horses, like the men, are carefully borne in mind. Everywhere, the aim is to do the work in the best and the safest way.

Moreover, these are not competing interests, but seem rather to merge into one another. Thus one of Charlie’s economic standards—“I hope maybe there’ll be trees here for my son to cut in ten or twenty years”—becomes, in application, an ecological standard. And the ecological standard becomes, again, an economic standard as it proves to be good for business.

Most landowners, Charlie says, care how their woodlands are logged. Though they may need the income from their trees, they don’t want to sacrifice the health or beauty of their woods in order to get it. Charlie’s way of logging recommends itself to such people; he does not need to advertise. As we were driving away from his house on the morning of our second day, one of the neighbors waved us to a stop. This man makes his living selling firewood, and he had learned of two people who wanted
their woodlands logged by a horse logger. That is the way business comes to him, Charlie said. Like other horse loggers, he has all the work he can do, and more. It has been ten years since he has had to hunt for woodlots to log. He said, “Everybody else has buyers out running the roads, looking for timber.” But he can’t buy all that he is offered.

I don’t know that I have ever met a man with more enthusiasms than Charlie Fisher. I have mentioned already his abounding interest in his family, in forestry, and in working and pulling horses, but I have neglected to say that he is also a coon hunter. This seems to me a most revealing detail. Here is a man who makes his living by walking the woods all day, and who then entertains himself by walking the woods at night.

He told me that he had a list of several things he had planned to do when he retired, but that now, at sixty-six, he is busier than ever.

“Well,” I said, “you seem to be enjoying it.”

“Oh,” he said, “I
love
it!”

(1980)

I
N THE DAYS when the Southdown ram was king of the sheep pastures and the show ring, Henry Besuden of Vinewood Farm in Clark County, Kentucky, was perhaps the premier breeder and showman of County, Kentucky, was perhaps the premier breeder and showman of Southdown sheep in the United States. The list of his winnings at major shows would be too long to put down here, but the character of his achievement can be indicated by his success in showing carload lots of fat lambs in the Chicago International Livestock Exposition. Starting in 1946, he sent eighteen carloads to the International, and won the competition twelve times. “I had ’em fat,” he says, remembering. “I had ’em good.” Such was the esteem and demand for his stock among fellow breeders that in 1954 he sold a yearling ram for $1,200, then a record price for a Southdown.

One would imagine that such accomplishments must have rested on the very best of Bluegrass farmland. But the truth, nearly opposite to that, is much more interesting. “If I’d inherited good land,” Henry Besuden says, “I’d probably have been just another Bluegrass farmer.”

What he inherited, in fact, was 632 acres of rolling land, fairly steep in places, thin soiled even originally, and by the time he got it, worn-out,
“corned to death.” His grandfather would rent the land out to corn, two hundred acres at a time, and not even get up to see where it would be planted—even though “it was understood to be the rule that renters ruined the land.” By the time Henry Besuden was eight years old both his mother and father were dead, and the land was farmed by tenants under the trusteeship of a Cincinnati bank. When the farm came to him in 1927, it was heavily encumbered by debt and covered with gullies, some of which were deep enough to hide a standing man.