MOHS SURGERY

 My appointment was at 9 am on Monday to have skin cancer, the size of a dime removed from my lower right leg.  The biopsy, taken a month earlier, showed it to be basal cell cancer.   After checking in at the front desk of the Advanced Skin Center in Roseburg, I was instructed to wait in the second waiting room until my name was called.   Most the patients in the waiting room were old men, some with bandages on their noses, faces, arms and God knows where else.   It looked like a room filled with the walking wounded.   Mohs surgery involves cutting out the tissue with cancer, having it examined by the pathologist and if the edges of the tissue is free of cancer cells they stitch you up.   If it is not clear of cancer cells more cutting is performed until it become clear.  Some people could be in here all day.   I have been through this procedure before and never had to go back for a second cutting.  Medical staff personnel walked through the waiting room carrying towels, garments and other medical supplies.  Soon a young woman, who was a  medical assistant appeared calling out a name.   Not getting a response she yelled out the name and an elderly man responded and off he went following the young woman.   I got the impression some of these gentlemen had a hearing problem in addition to skin cancer.   After waiting a half hour my name Mike was called out, and off I went to an examination room where the medical assistant introduced herself, asked a few question and proceeded to injecting a numbing substance around the area that would be removed.  After a couple minutes she poked around the area asking if I could feel anything?   It was totally numbed and off she went to get the surgeon.   The surgeon looked like a man that had been up most the night, in desperate need of coffee with those big telescope lenses fasten to his glasses, like the ones a dentist wears.   He was a man of few words as he put on rubber gloves, picked up a scalpel and quickly did his business placing the chunk of flesh in a glass container the medical assistant was holding.   As he left the room he told me it would be an hour before he would have the pathology results done.   I asked the medical assistant if he was the pathologist too, and she replied yes.   He was a busy man and no wonder he looked tired.    The medical assistant applied a pressure bandage to my wound after cauterizing it to stop the bleeding and took me back out to the waiting room.  

While sitting in the waiting room for the results, an older couple sat down next to me.  The man told me they had come all way that morning from Port Orford on the Oregon Coast.   We got to talking as he told me they lived up Elk River, which I was very familiar with when I worked for the Forest Service in Gold Beach back in the 1980's.   He mentioned a few names of people that I had known including some loggers.   Soon his name was called and off he went.  Then another man sat next to me asking if he was in the right room.  I asked what he was here for and he did not seem to know.   He had come from Cottage Grove and said he had been here before to have something on his face looked at.   As we were talking I heard a man call out William, my first name which I usually don't respond too.  Everybody looked around as nobody responded, until I asked what is the last name and he said Burke, and off we went to another section of the facility where I was told to my relief the tissue was clear of cancer.  Here I was stitched up and a large compression bandage was applied from my knee down to my foot to keep the leg from swelling.  I was instructed to keep the leg elevated for a few days and not to get the bandage wet for week.   A real challenge for taking a shower.   After going to the front desk for scheduling appointments for the bandage removal in a week and in two weeks for the stitches to be removed, I walked out the front door with a new lease on life or at least until next July, when I'm scheduled for my six month full body exam.   I still wonder if that man from Cottage Grove ever found out what he was there for?     

MY DOG JACK

It was a late November afternoon in 1989 when I was about ready to leave work at the Cottage Grove Ranger District office and go home to a little house I rented on Lynx Hollow Road north of Cottage Grove.   No sooner than I started packing up my things to head out the door when a woman that worked on the road maintenance crew came up to me asking if I would take a puppy they picked up walking along a forest road where it was beginning to snow.   She knew I had just put my old family dog Corky to sleep because of health issues.   She said she could not take the dog because they already had some dogs.    So I went home with the little black puppy that looked more like a cub bear that I named Jack.

There was a storage room in the back of the house where I left Jack during the day with food, water and a partially opened window as I went off to work.   When I came home at night I let Jack out in the back yard and he had free range in the house at night.   One wall of the storage room had unpacked boxes of items from the house I sold in Gold Beach in 1988.   After a few weeks I noticed Jack was in a corner of the storage room as if something had been bothering him during the day.  One day I saw a wild cat jump in through the opened window and discovered she had a litter of kittens in one of the boxes.   Jack had become accustomed to this wild cat coming and going as she raised her kittens.   Later I discovered the after birth in the box where she had the litter.   The wild cat and her kittens left the house to live in the barn behind the house and roam the nearby fields for rats or other small varmints.   In 1991 I bought a house in south Eugene in order to allow my two children to live with me on a part-time basis while they were in high school and their mother was considering moving out of the area.   Jack was two years old and I constructed a fenced yard with a dog house where he stayed when I was working in Cottage Grove.  Over the next few years Jack went on many hikes, backpacking trips and in the Fall of 1997 went on a  cross country car trip with me to visit a sister living in Indiana.    When Celia and I bought a house in Cottage Grove and got married in 2000 Jack became part of the family.   Jack was susceptible to seizures and in 2005 we had to send him over the Rainbow Bridge due to failing health.  

      

THE END OF A LONG WINTER

Yesterday I made the drive to Eugene to close Celia's credit union account and distribute the remaining funds to her two daughters.   On my return trip I left the freeway at Creswell and drove east on Cloverdale Road, then turned south onto to Sears Road which goes along the eastside of the Coast Fork of the Willamette River all the way to the Row River Road east of Cottage Grove.    There was only one other car on the road during my drive.   It was the first real spring-like day this year with green fields, cattle grazing in lush pastures, old logging equipment in a field now overgrown with blackberries, the old Hemmenway Dairy now with vacant barns and the other scattered farms along this 12 mile route.  Driving this route was like going back 30 years when I worked for the Forest Service on the Cottage Grove Ranger District with all the log truck traffic delivering their loads to all the mills in the vicinity that are gone now, the smell of the manure from the dairy, and the many Sunday drives that Celia and I made on this road when we lived in Cottage Grove, especially to the Cloverdale Chapel on October 7, 2000 to get married.  Yesterday was a good day and I do believe this long winter is over. 

THE BUS ISSUE

The Lane Transit District (LTD) went as far south of Eugene as Creswell in the 1990's.  Some people in Cottage Grove car pooled to Creswell to catch the bus into Eugene, mostly students attending Lane Community College or the University of Oregon and some people working in Eugene not wanting to deal with parking problems.   The business community of Cottage Grove was against extending the district to Cottage Grove in fear that people would do more shopping in Eugene, plus they did not want to pay the .05% business tax to support the bus.    The issue was put to the voters of Cottage Grove and the business community campaigned against it telling voters they would be taxed and how business would decline locally with people doing more shopping in Eugene.   At the time LTD had routes to McKenzie Bridge, 50 miles up the McKenzie River Highway, Junction City and Veneta all supported by local businesses along those routes.   Finally the voters approved extending the transit district to Cottage Grove.   In the end nobody went out of business and there was no space taken up in the bus by shoppers bringing sheets of plywood, yard equipment, appliances or furniture back from Eugene on the bus.   Just passengers with their back packs, brief cases and lunch bags.  

COTTAGE GROVE RD

                                             Cottage Grove Ranger District

                                                  Umpqua National Forest

                                                               1988-1995

In the spring of 1988 I took a transfer to Cottage Grove to be closer to my children, who were living with their mother in University of Oregon housing in Eugene.   This transfer came about by an agreement between the District Ranger of Gold Beach and the District Ranger of the Cottage Grove District.  It is a transfer I will always be grateful for.   The previous sale administrator was burned out on doing sale administration work and was given a job in silviculture doing mapping under the geographic information system (GIS) and his position of lead sale administrator was given to me.  

During the first month I lived in motels until a lady in the office informed me of a small house for rent on Lynx Hollow Road, north of Cottage Grove.   I lived there for three years until I bought a house in Eugene, where my children could live with me part-time.    In some ways I was hoping to get back together with my wife after moving to Cottage Grove, but it did not happen and we mutually agreed to divorce in 1990.  

All District personnel were in one big office building east of Cottage Grove, whereas in Gold Beach people were in four different buildings.  It was the smallest District I had worked on and seem to have the most people, maybe 30 to 40 permanent positions.   It was one big happy family under one roof.   There were seven or eight permanent people in the timber department and all under the supervision of Wayne, the Timber Management Assistant (TMA),  he was also the Forest Service Representative (FSR) for timber sale contracts.   We had the biggest room on the south end of the building with its own door by my desk, where loggers could enter the building without going through the front office.   The annual timber cut (ASQ) was about 40 million board feet, I think, much smaller than other Districts I had worked on.   There was another contract administrator, by the name of Jerry, who was financed part-time in sale administration and sale planning.    The District takes in the Layng Creek and Brice Creek watersheds that are part of the Coast Fork of the Willamette River system.    The south end of the District includes the Bohemia Mining District, where much mining took place in the 1860's to the early 1900's.   The only access was by trail to the mining town of Bohemia City at over 5000 feet in elevation, where an estimated 10,000 people lived at one time, and survive the cold winters.   

For the most part timber operations functioned like a well-oiled machine with presale and sale administration in the same department.    There were more commercial thinning sales here than what I experienced on other Districts.   A portion of the north end of the District had been logged in the early 1900's using a railroad system up Prather Creek and much of this area was ready for thinning.   Now roads replaced the the old train system.  When I arrived on the District there were three commercial thinning sales in progress up Prather Creek.   Much of my time was spent on these sales agreeing to tractor skid trails, skyline corridors, landings and spur roads.   Most logging south of Prather Creek was clearcut logging.  The biggest clearcut sale I remember was the Jumbo Sale with an estimated 12 million board feet of timber on the Noon Day Road in the Brice Creek drainage.    The Noon Day Road is located near what was the trail to Bohemia City.   The Jumbo Sale was purchased by the Bohemia Lumber Company, that had a large mill at Culp Creek, a saw mill at Saginaw with a laminated beam plant adjacent to it.   Bohemia was sold to Willamette Industries, which was bought out by the Weyerhaeuser Company.   The Bohemia mills are gone now.  The only remaining mills are the Starfire Mill in Cottage Grove and the large Weyerhaeuser Mill south of Cottage Grove.  

The listing of the Northern Spotted Owl in 1990 put the brakes on future timber sale planning on National Forests in the Pacific Northwest, especially west of the Cascades.   By 1994 the Forest Service started offering buy-outs in order to downsize personnel, especially road engineers, foresters and technicians that were working in the timber management program.   In March of 1995 I took a buyout after 27 years with the Forest Service.

Today the Cottage Grove District office is located in the Dorena Tree Improvement Center with a skeleton crew compared to what it used to be..   There is no longer any timber people on the District

MY MUSICAL BACKGROUND

 As a young child, I don't remember much music is the home. With 6 children my mother didn't have the time to, and maybe not the interest to promote music appreciation with us.   I don't even remember a radio being turned on

In grade school, it wasn't until the 5th or 6th grade when some students had to buy these red flute instruments, called tonettes, and learn how to play them.  Our class was not included as we were considered slow learners.   On rainy days when we could not have P.E. classes outside, we had to go to the basement and dance to the songs of Pat Boone.   It was horrifying having to ask a girl to dance and then proceed to step on her feet a few times while trying to dance.  

 In my junior year of high school, there was a choral class first thing in the morning in the gymnasium.  Not sure how I ended up in the class.  The first day each student had to hum to a note the teacher played on the piano.    When it was over six of us boys were told to sit up in the bleachers, do our homework, don't cause a disturbance and you will get a C grade in the class.  We were considered tone-deaf. 

As the years went by most music I listen to was country-western or folk on the radio of whatever vehicle I was driving while doing farm work.  Most of the country-western music was about how some woman left her man and his tears were flowing in his beer, not the most upbeat.    During my two years in the Army most music was at the beer garden or EM (enlisted man's) club where they were playing songs dealing with the Vietnam war while we could not consume the beer fast enough.   

When Celia and I were living in Cottage Grove we got involved with a group of people in Eugene, many retired teachers, some musicians that needed people to form a band to play at retirement homes.  They were willing to teach us less fortunate people with no musical talents.    They even provided instruments and taught us how to read music.   Celia picked the flute and I the saxophone.    We did not become masters at it, but it filled in for what we missed out on in those early years.    

SPRING RAIN

Whatever happened to those spring rain storms of the past?   In the 1980's and 90's I can remember heavy rain storms on my drive back home from Cottage Grove to Eugene.  Sometimes you could hardly see the highway with the wind shield wipers going full blast.  This would continue up until the 4th of July, then summer would begin with less frequent rain until the middle of October.   Now the rain tapers off quickly after March.   At our place in Douglas County the 30 year average for March is 4.24 inches.  So far for this March we have received less than an inch (0.77) and spring officially doesn't start for another week.  Hopefully the weather man is correct about his forecast for a wet spring.  

Water is our greatest resource and good quality water is disappearing fast.   Like Ben Franklin said in Poor Richard's Almanac, "When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water."

Turn Back Timber Sales (TB)

The attached is a short narrative of the TB sales caused by speculative bidding in the 1980's.    During my career with the Forest Service, this was very prevalent on both the Gold Beach and Cottage Grove Districts where I worked.   

How many of you know about this?

THE GOVERNMENT BAIL-OUT OF THE TIMBER INDUSTRY

 

In the 1980’s there had been much speculative bidding on National Forest timber sales.  Most of the large timber sales had a five-year contract period depending on how much volume (board feet of timber) on each sale.    Bidding on these sales was very competitive because of the number of mills dependent on government timber to stay in business.   Many purchasers acquired these sales by biding more than what they could get for the price of their finished products but were hoping that the market would go up during the contract period.   The first couple of years they would construct the roads on these high-priced sales, deck the right-of-way timber for later removal and utilize the earned road credits for payment of timber removed on other cheaper sales.  

Over the next three or four years the housing market went down and many purchasers were sitting on timber sales they could not afford to log with only a year left to complete their contracts.  Some purchasers requested contract term extensions, but did not qualify under terms of the contract. 

They lobbied their Congressional representatives for the government to buy back these sales.    The government agreed under certain conditions.   First, the right-of-way log decks would be put up for sale and any defect caused by delay in their removal would be paid for by the original purchaser.   The original sale volume was reappraised and put up for a second bid and called “turn back volume” (TBV).   This “turn back volume” would count toward that District’s annual allowable cut again, which the timber industry strongly disagreed with, but to no avail, keeping the Forest Service from putting up additional new sales to meet their allowable cuts.   Plus it cost the Forest Service money and time to reappraise, modify and prepare these “turn back” sales for auction again.  

Many of these “turn back” (TB) sales were purchased a second time at a lower bid rate by the original purchasers.  To prevent speculative bidding in the future the Forest Service allowed only a two year contract period for most sales.      

A Valentine Story

 This event happened when we lived in Cottage Grove from 2000 to 2006.  Don't remember the exact year.  

While sitting in the pharmacy section of the Cottage Grove Bi-Mart, waiting for a prescription refill, I was in deep thought about the issues of the day.   I happened to look down the aisle and noticed a good looking woman browsing through items on the shelves.  Being a married man, guilt was my first reaction for looking, then I realized it was Celia, my wife.     

Happy Valentine's Day!

Holiday Cheer at the Cottage Grove Post Office

 When I first moved to Cottage Grove in 1988 to work for the Forest Service, I rented a P.O. Box.  The Post Office was located up town at the corner of 5th Street and Washington Avenue, if I remember correctly.  The only available parking was on the streets.  It was a week or so before Christmas.   After work every day I would drive up town to pick up my mail before driving north of town where I rented a small house on Lynx Hollow Road.   This day there was a package slip in my box, so I got in line at the front deck to receive the package.   There may have been 3 or 4 people ahead of me.   I noticed only two people working, one at the front counter and a man in the back sorting mail.  There were packages of all sizes scattered down the aisles and piled on selves, it did not look very organized.   One of the men ahead of me in the line handed his package slip to the clerk.   The clerk spent a good part of 5 minutes walking through the aisles looking for the package with no success in finding it.  By this time there were a line of people going out the door onto the sidewalk.   The clerk returned to the counter and asked the man if he would come back later.  The man waiting for his package was stunned, including those of us standing nearby.    By the time I got to the counter the clerk did find my package.  He seemed  to be spaced out, maybe overworked or had been smoking something besides tobacco, who knows?   The other man in the back continued sorting mail in slow motion as if he was the only person there.   Wonder where the Postmaster was?   As I made my way out the door people were starting to lose the holiday spirit and the streets were filled with cars trying to find a place to park.  

Today there is a new Post Office in Cottage Grove, and it even has a parking lot.

Happy Holidays!

Mike

PS-- there will be more short holiday stories as they come to mind, some of these have been told before.  

Porcelain Signs

 How many have ever seen the old porcelain trail signs with the white background and green lettering?   My first sighting of one was in the Marble Mountain Wilderness in the 1970's.   Don't remember what it said, but remember it being on a tree along an abandoned trail.   Do remember one or two on the Hardesty Mountain trail system along the north boundary of the Cottage Grove District of the Umpqua National Forest.   Seems they had been there so long the trees were growing over them.

These signs date back to the 1930's and not sure when they were replaced with wooden signs.    Over the years many of the wooden signs have been damaged by animals, used as target practice or removed by people thinking they would look better as a mantel piece.   Most National Forests used to have a sign shop at their main shop and warehouse facilities located in the community where the Forest Supervisor's office was.   Not sure if that is still the case.   With all the wildfires most the wooden signs probably are gone, but the old metal porcelain signs could be buried in the ash for future generations to discover and wonder what prehistoric civilization used these and what happened to those places named on the signs?  

Moving to Douglas County

 MOVING TO DOUGLAS COUNTY

                                                                      2006

 

In 2003 we bought 10 acres in the hills west of Oakland in Douglas County.   This property had a one room cabin with wood stove, two sheds, a 2500 water tank with a solar pump and no neighbors in sight.  Our intention was to have a place to escape to, start a native plant nursery and have a source of firewood for our home in Cottage Grove.    We moved our 16 foot travel trailer on the property to provide us with a kitchen, bathroom and sleeping quarters when we came to spend a night or two. 

In 2002 our quiet neighborhood on the west side of Cottage Grove was about to change with the development of the forested hill side behind our house, called Mt. David.   The developer was proposing a subdivision of 400 to 600 homes.    He was in the process of obtaining the necessary permits from the city as many of our neighbors were protesting this development because of the lack of city infrastructure to support this size of development and the increase in future traffic.  This was evident in the winter of 2004 when our neighborhood was flooded due inadequate storm water drainage when all the water came off Mt. David from the newly constructed roads.   We joined a group called the Friends of Mt. David to fight with city government over this development, but the city could only smell money from increased tax revenue and we were fighting a losing battle.   Soon the sound of construction equipment would wake us in the early morning hours.  It was time to move.

Celia found a real estate ad for an old two story house on five acres near Elkton, about 35 miles southwest of Cottage Grove.   We made an offer on the place contingent on us selling the Cottage Grove house, which we put on the market in the spring of 2006.   A few months went by with no interest from buyers until we lowered the asking price by $10k then we started having people looking at the house.  An older woman made us a good offer that we accepted and we had 30 days to vacate the place.  In the meantime the place near Elkton had sold to a cash buyer.   Our only option was moving to our 10 acres outside of Oakland or become homeless in the short-term.   During a visit to our 10 acres we noticed a for sale sign up the road on the next 10 acre lot just north of our place.   It had a newer manufactured home on it, plus a big shop and a water house with a 2500 gallon tank and pressure pump, since there was no well water here.    The owner was a school teacher working in Elkton and had purchased a house there to be closer to her school.   We made her an offer that she accepted and the move began.  The lady that had bought the Cottage Grove house had to be out of her rented apartment soon, so she started moving stuff into the garage as we started moving stuff out the front door and hauling it to our new place with our pickup and trailer.  Instead of returning to Cottage Grove empty we helped move the school teacher to her new house in Elkton before returning to Cottage Grove.  She allowed us to move stuff in the back door as she was moving out the front door.   It was pure chaos and we don’t care to repeat it again. 

We have lived here 14 years, the longest place I have lived since leaving my hometown of Willows, in northern California in 1966.   It is the longest place where Celia has ever continuously lived.    We’re not moving any time soon.  

Cats

 When Celia and I moved to Douglas County in October of 2006 we brought along 16 cats from our place we sold on Ash Street in Cottage Grove.  Now you’re probably asking yourself how did we acquire all those cats?   It was a combination of cats Celia had at her house on 1st Street in Cottage Gove and a few I inherited while living in Eugene from 1991 to 2000.   Some were left to me by my daughter when she left home and others that wandered in after being abandoned from an apartment complex a few blocks away.   We don’t remember the exact number when we got married in 2000 and bought a house together on Ash Street in Cottage Grove.    The people that we bought the house from had been feeding stray cats that lived in the alley behind the house.   They asked us to continue feeding them.  There may have been three or four at that time.    Over the six years we lived in the Ash Street house more cats showed up.   They must have sensed this was a good place to hang out.  There were white cats, orange cats, black cats, multi colored cats, skinny cats and few fat cats.   Two more cats showed up that were left behind by a couple that were renting a house down the street from us.  There was one cat that started showing at the back door whining for something to eat at night.  He was a black cat Celia called Marvin.  He would eat then run off.  Eventually he would let Celia pet him.   During the winters many of these cats lived under the tool shed we had in the back yard.   In addition to all the cats there was my dog Jack, who was raised with cats when I lived in Eugene.   

In 2006 we sold the Ash Street house to a woman who was allergic to cats and a condition of the sale was all the cats had go.    It took a week to trap the wild cats and bring them to our new place in Douglas County.   There is a shop by the house where we put all the cats to have them adjust to the move.  The first night they figured out how to open a back entrance into a dog pen behind the shop.   The next day we had cats scattered all over the mountain side.   For the next week we could see cats running through the woods, the neighbor’s pasture down near the highway and in the meadow on our lower 10 acres.  Over the next few weeks most of the cats came back, except Marvin who we never saw again.    My old dog Jack never made the move either, as we had to send over the Rainbow Bridge due to health issues that come with old age.   With winter coming on I built a two story cat house in the back of the shop with a heater where cats could take shelter from the cold weather.    There never was a rat problem in the shop.  

Some of our domesticated cats stayed in the house during the winter nights.  In addition to the cats we moved from Cottage Grove the previous owner of our new property left us her cat since she was moving near the highway in Elkton knowing her cat would not survive there.   Over the years cats started disappearing, we suspect from critters, such as a Bob cat that has been spotted in the vicinity.   We call him the Boogie kitty and many of our cats have become cautious of getting too far from the house.   Other cats died from diseases or were taken to the Vet for the trip over the Rainbow Bridge.  Some of these were replaced by other cats that wandered onto the place, either from being dumped down the road or one we call Joe that we believe had been abused by a neighbor up the hill.   Joe is still with us.

After 14 years of living here we are down to four cats and the oldest being Toby pushing 20 years.  He was picked out of a box of kittens in front of the Cottage Grove Bi-Mart by Celia in 2000 or 2001.   There is sadness thinking back on all these cats that were part of our family.    The good side of the story is most of these cats had a good life because we took them into our care knowing many of them would never had made it without us.  

The search for Home

 After hanging out together for three years Celia and I decided to get married and the date was set for October 7, 2000.   The big question was where were we going to live?   Her house in Cottage Grove and my house in Eugene were out of the question since both were too small.   We both had our criteria in what we wanted in a house.   Celia visualized a white picket fence, roses growing over the front door and the basic amenities to make life comfortable.  A few things men do not give much thought to.  I was more interested in a garage or outbuilding where I could work on my power equipment, have all my tools and do what men have to do, basically things women do not understand.   We both had common ground in wanting some space for a garden.

Our search went as far south as Douglas County, as far west as Veneta and north to Harrisburg and Junction City in Lane County.  Some houses looked good, but no garage, others were in need of some repairs, some too expensive and a few in bad locations.  We even looked around Eugene and Cottage Grove, but nothing met our criteria.  Then we made a trip to Wallowa County in the northeast corner of Oregon.  This is beautiful country with the Wallowa Mountains, valleys and Hell’s Canyon.  We stayed in the town of Joseph for three days looking at houses in the area, including a trip to Imnaha on the edge of the Hell’s Canyon with a population of 50.   The down side to living here was the long cold winters, a short growing season and the thought that our children would never come visit us.   At this point I was getting discouraged, but Celia kept looking.   One night she called me about a house she saw on the west side of Cottage Grove.   She wanted to make an appointment to look at it and wanted me to come along.  I reluctantly agreed.    The house had an attached garage, had been remodeled, in a quiet part of town, reasonably priced and the best part it had a work shop in the back yard along with with enough space for a garden.  As we departed the house I noticed a mail slot by the front door and thought how convenient.    We started walking toward the car and I turned to Celia and said, “let’s buy it”.  She was stunned!

Working on a Grass Seed Farm 1996-2000

 In the winter of 1996 I enrolled at Lane Community College near Eugene and took a course of study in Agricultural and Industrial Equipment Technology.   After completing two terms I received a certificate in Diesel Electrical Systems.  An alumni of the course, who was a shop foreman on a grass seed farm out of Harrisburg asked the teacher if any students would be interested in a seasonal job.   I raised my hand and the job was offered to me.   Basically I became the chief grease monkey operating a service truck and running from field to field each morning servicing farm equipment.   This work consisted of filling fuel tanks, checking oil levels, greasing the machines, blowing out radiators and air filters.  Don’t remember doing much electrical work.  Shop work was more of the same working on fork lifts, trucks, machinery in the warehouse and running into Harrisburg for parts once or twice a week.   Most of the equipment was operated by local high school students.   Whenever one of them did not show up in the morning or have to leave before the end of the day it was me that replaced them in the cab of a combine.   This was monotonous work going round and around with four other combines equipped with pickup headers going wherever the windrows took us.    The north wind would be blowing and the dust would follow us, sometimes going ahead of the machine where we could not see much beyond the cab.    By late afternoon my eyelids would start getting heavy and the fear of falling asleep would overtake me, even with the a/c and radio going.   Sometimes I would have to slap myself to stay awake in fear of the combine wandering off course and going in some nearby ditch.    The days were long, 10 to 14 hours depending on the air moisture in the evenings.   At the end of the day there would be some trucks filled grass seed that had to be driven back to the warehouse and emptied.   It would be 10 or 11 pm some nights when I got back home in Eugene.   The next day I would be up and gone by 7 am to beat the rush hour traffic.   My lunch box had enough food for lunch and dinner.   Sunday night dinners were provided by the farm consisting of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and all the side dishes for those working that day.    It was delivered out in the field to each combine or tractor operator to eat while working.   I definitely don’t care for that stuff anymore.  By mid-August most combine work was done and all hands had to operate a tractor to work the fields in preparation for seeding next year’s crop.   Burning of grass seed straw was no longer permitted and the straw had to be worked back into the ground by plowing, disking, and harrowing until the soil was almost turned into to dust.  This work would end each day by 5 pm and usually completed by end of September when I was laid off for the season.   There was no overtime for this work and during periods of rain the crew was laid off until things dried out, sometimes for up to a week.  If we worked the entire season until we got laid off we received a bonus check near Christmas time.  

I continued doing this job for the next four summers.   One morning in August of 2000, while driving north on I-5 to the farm I missed the Harrisburg turnoff and did not realize it until I saw the sign for the Brownsville Exist.   It was time to call it quits, plus Celia and I were getting ready to move into our house in Cottage Grove and get married in October.    I could not imagine adding another 20 miles to the daily commute.    No bonus check was received that year.

The Gardening Story

 Gardening has always been a big part of my life.  Of all the places I have lived I would scratch out some kind of garden plot.   When we lived in Greenville, California we purchased a 7 horse power Troy-Built rototiller in 1977, to till a fenced garden plot that was next to the old ranch house we rented.   After moving into a government house on the Gold Beach Ranger Station in 1979 the tiller came with us, but we were not allowed to develop a garden plot since the station was on the National Historical Register as it had been constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corp or CCC.   A few month after our arrival some friends let us garden on their property outside of town.   In 1981 we bought our first house on two acres along Hunter Creek, two miles south of Gold Beach.    Here we had a big garden, chickens, a sheep for wool, a goat for milk and a fixer-upper house with all its never ending repair projects.   As if I did not have enough to do, there were weekends I helped neighbors and friends with tilling their gardens.   In the fall of 1986 my wife and two children moved to Eugene where she attended the University of Oregon.   In 1988 I was offered a job with the Forest Service in Cottage Grove to be closer to family and rented a house on Lynx Hollow Road where I developed a small garden.    Shortly thereafter the Gold Beach house was sold.  In 1990 my wife and I went our separate ways with a divorce and in order to have my children live with me on a part-time basis I bought a small house in Eugene in 1991 where they were attending school.   Here I developed a blueberry patch that the neighbors and a few homeless people enjoyed who were living in the nearby ash tree swamp along Amazon Creek in South Eugene.  

When I left the Forest Service in March of 1995 a co-worker, who had an artistic talent for drawing, made me a cartoon advertisement which included my phone number and a sketch of me and my dog Jack rototilling.  I hung the poster up at the Oasis Market on Willamette Street in Eugene and the phone started ringing with job offers.   People started telling their friends and neighbors of my rototilling service and at times the phone was ringing off the hook.   Some of those people asked if I would do other work, such as pruning, hauling garden soil, hauling yard debris, building fences, painting, repairing lawn mowers or other power equipment.  There was one woman who wanted me to teach her husband how to do gardening work.   He seemed to be more content watching TV and drinking beer.  Another woman with a plot at a community garden hired me to rototill after dark by the headlights of her pickup.    Then there was the woman with many cats on leashes in her back yard that would hire me once a year to haul a pallet of cat food from a store in North Eugene and help her unload it in her garage.   One of the most colorful clients was an older woman that was always in her bathrobe that wanted to be called Grandma.   I did a variety of work for her from rototilling, cutting blackberries and removing a Willow tree that had fallen in her yard.   When it came time to pay me she would always add a large bonus from a big roll of cash she had in her house.    I tried to refuse the extra money, but she would reply, “never argue with Grandma”.  There was a woman who wanted to sell me her 8 horse power Troy-Built tiller at a cheap price and I bought it thinking it might come in handy when the other one broke down.     All my equipment was hauled around Eugene and Springfield in my old rusty 1975 Ford pickup.    The bolts holding the bed to the frame were so badly rusted out I feared losing it all on some busy intersection, luckily it never happened.

In 1997 I bought a DR Brush mower and took on brush and high grass mowing jobs, many located in the hills south of Eugene.   Some of these elegant homes had acreage with forest land and private driveways in need of vegetation clearing.   A few of these land owners asked me to estimate the value of their timber.   After deducting logging costs from the market value of the logs and adding the expense for cleaning up the mess or logging slash there was little return to the land owners. 

One of the better paying jobs was with the University of Oregon Housing Department that would hire me to do chainsaw work on hazard trees and brush mowing around houses they owned east of the campus.   There was no bidding required.  The housing manger would call me, show me what had to be done and paid me whatever I billed them, no questions asked.    

Most of this gardening work was seasonal from March into June and by fall the phone calls were far and few between.   In the fall of 1996 I enrolled at Lane Community College and studied Agricultural and Industrial Equipment Technology taking courses over four terms in electrical systems, hydraulics, welding and engine repair.   Except for a welding class two nights a week all other classes started at 7am and were out by noon giving me the afternoons to schedule any calls for work. 

Under an apprenticeship program with this class it landed me a seasonal job from June through September from 1996 to 2000 as a mechanic and equipment operator on a grass seed farm near Harrisburg.    Whenever summer rains shut down operations on the farm for a few days I would catch up on a few gardening jobs in and around Eugene. 

In November of 1997 I met Celia, who was working for the Olum Child Care Center at the University of Oregon.   By the spring of 1998 she was helping me with gardening jobs on weekends and enrolled in the OSU Master Gardeners Program.   Thereafter she became a partner and the brains of the outfit we called C & M Gardening Service, a business registered with the Oregon Secretary of State which we operated together until we moved to our property outside of Oakland, Oregon in 2006 when we officially retired.   By the way we also got married in October of 2000 and bought a house in Cottage Grove.

Job Hazards with Logging

 Today was a wet cold day, so got back to my writings.  Came up with this one attached hereto, about the hazards I and others had to put up with on logging jobs and the fear of wrecking a Forest Service vehicle.

While working for the Forest Service as a timber sale contract administrator for 20 years, I saw a few injuries to loggers and almost had a couple myself.   Logging is considered one of the most hazardous jobs there is, involving the falling of trees, yarding or skidding of logs to a landing, loading logs onto trucks and driving those log trucks to the mills.   For myself, working alone most the time there was always the daily challenge of being safe.   Driving forest roads with logging traffic was always a hazard.  Knowing the location of turnouts was critical to avoid a collision while driving to a logging operation. Listening to the CB radio was important to know where the next loaded truck was or it was best to follow an empty truck to the job.   There were always the usual hazards, running into a hornets nests while walking in the woods or falling and breaking a leg or arm.   I had my fair share of stings from hornets and had one bad fall down over a rocky ledge while posting a cutting boundary on the Orleans District of the Six Rivers National Forest.  Took me a while to walk back up hill to the truck with an injured knee as it was starting to snow.

  When walking downhill in a unit being cut from the bottom up it was vital to yell out to let the timber fallers know my position.  Once on the Gold Beach District of the Siskiyou National Forest in 1985 the logging manager for the Champion plywood mill in Gold Beach and I walked into a unit where the fallers were jacking trees away from a protected stream.   We did not hear saws running and thought the two fallers were taking a break.   As we got closer we noticed a tree top moving in our direction and realized they had been jacking the tree to fall alongside the tree we were walking on.   We both turned and ran, but I knew I would never out run it, so jumped off the down tree and took cover under it as the big old growth fir fell along side of it shaking the ground.  Something I will never forget.   The logging managers came running back yelling my name thinking I had been hit and was glad to see me crawl back up from under the tree.   Afterward the four of us discussed our mistakes, especially not yelling out to let the fallers know we were coming and the fallers for not yelling out “Down she comes or timber!”   On another job where log cutters were bucking blow down trees into logs a log above rolled over a cutter breaking both his legs in a couple of places.   His cutting partner walked to their truck to call for help on the two-way radio.   An ambulance arrived from Gold Beach when I got there and I assisted with five other people transporting the injured cutter on a litter over down trees to the road below where the ambulance was waiting.   He would yell out in pain as we made our way over the logs.

My first encounter with an injured logger was on the Orleans District of the Six Rivers National Forest in 1975.   While driving past a unit being cut a timber faller had walked up out of the unit to his truck, so I stopped to talk to him.   He was bleeding from the mouth and was missing some teeth.   He told me he had looked up while falling a tree and a small branch came down hitting him in the face.   He was headed home to Happy Camp, about 80 miles away and said he could make it.   The next day he was back on the job.   One of the most tragic incidents, that I did not see was a cat operator clearing logs from a road right-of-way job and setting his own chokers in order to skid the logs to a deck.   While taking chokers off the winch behind the cat it began to roll backwards, pinning him to a tree.  He was found dead at the end of the day by his foreman.   The cat engine was still idling. 

It was important to know where cables were located when inspecting a unit during the yarding operation, usually to check if required fire tools and clearings around cable blocks were being complied with.   All movements of cables is under the direction of the rigging slinger, supervising the choker setters or the hook tender doing layout of a new cable road.   One whistle means stop, two means go back on it, three means go forward, usually with a load of logs.  There was a small quarter inch diameter cable called the ‘hay wire’ used to pull the bigger cables during a road change.   Sometimes it was hard to detect where this cable was as it was usually laid out over down logs or in the brush.    Once on the Orleans District I walked over this cable as I heard a series of whistles and shortly after crossing it the cable jumped up in the air six feet and was moving faster than I care to remember.

During my career from 1988 to 95 on the Cottage Grove District of the Umpqua National Forest there were two accidents.    One involved a small logging contractor, who was branding logs while they were being loaded onto the truck.  A small log rolled off the truck killing the man instantly.   The other was on a thinning operation when a guy line on a small swing boom yarder broke and the yarder fell on its side pinning the operator’s foot under it.   An ambulance was called for from Cottage Grove and I had to guide it up a maze of logging roads to where the accidents happened.   They had to dig the man’s foot free to get him out of the machine.

There were other accidents and fatalities that happened on other jobs I was not associated with.   Usually two or three times a year the state OSHA inspector would make a visit to our office and wanted to know where any logging operations were happening and get a map of their locations.    When the word got out some small loggers would just shut down for a day or two to avoid getting any citations for safety violations, usually for using frayed or worn out cables, faulty safety equipment or personnel not wearing proper safety gear.   

One of the most memorable accidents was when a Forest Service employee in the silviculture department at Gold Beach was assigned a new Ford pickup and drove it onto a landing to inspect a plantation.  He looked back at his truck to see it roll over the landing and tumble down to the bottom of the unit.   He had left it in neutral and forgot to apply the brake.   He was walking back toward Gold Beach when my supervisor picked him up and asked what happened to his truck.   Even   my boss had a hard time digesting what had happened.  The cost of that new truck was deducted from the employees pay for many years. 

At least in all my years I never wrecked a Forest Service truck, but had my fair share of close calls.   I do recall the gear shift stick coming out of transmission on a return trip to Cottage Grove and had to leave it in 3^rd gear all the way back to the station.   Looking back I feel lucky to have made it this far.