The Brush Picker

 Thinking back on some of the colorful characters that lived in Orleans, in northwestern California where I worked for the Forest Service from 1971-77, there is one that stands out by the name of Fred Starnes.  He lived across the highway from where I lived, next to the brush shed in a small camp trailer.   The brush shed was operated by Evergreen Flora, based in Washington State.    It was a long old building with a covered deck, where trucks backed up to for loading or unloading their bundles of huckleberry.  No fancy landscaping around the shed, just some oak trees and dry grass.  The Evergreen truck would arrive once a month to collect the huckleberry to be used in floral decorations.   Fred was a brush picker, a timber faller and a security guard during the night at the brush shed, which provided him a place to park his trailer free of rent.  He was a tall skinny man in his 40’s and drove a VW bug with big tires for better traction on some rough forest roads.   Fred had a family living in Willow Creek, about 40 miles south on Highway 96, where it intersect with Highway 299.    Brush picking on the National Forest required a permit, and permittees were assigned an area exclusive to them.  There were other brush pickers in the community and some acted as graders, working in the brush shed for Evergreen.  Huckleberry had to be picked in a way that passed the grade and pickers were paid by the pound.   It was hard work walking through the woods, searching for the perfect branches to pick and pack it on your back, usually up steep mountains slopes back to your vehicle.    At the end of the day pickers would unload their bundles at the brush shed for grading and weighing.   There were a few times when I saw Fred walking along a forest road with his pack frame so loaded down with huckleberry you hardly see him under it all.   Whenever Fred had a timber falling job, he always worked by himself.   He had a couple of power saws and timber jacks.  He worked on some of the timber sales I had to oversee.   After a day of cutting timber he would walk back up hill to his VW bug with a load of huckleberry on his back.   This was not his permit area, but who really cared since it was going to be a clearcut eventually.    Like many timber fallers, Fred would take some empty plastic jugs with him in the morning to place next to freshly cut sumps to collect the tree sap, which was sold to pharmaceutical companies.     

On a few summer evenings a couple of us would gather around Fred’s campfire by his trailer and listen to his wild stories, while sitting on log rounds he provided for chairs as we all contributed to his pile of empty beer cans.   Some of his stories were a little on the far side, such as sightings of Bigfoot or a man he called Garlic Man, that lived in the woods and survived by eating garlic.  The thought occurred to me at times that maybe Fred had spent too much time alone in the brush.   There were a few times I could hear Fred talking to himself when I was at my place across the highway.  Looking back maybe we all spent too much time working in the brush while living in Orleans.