Attribution: Photo by Phyllis Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper and Phyllis with their lumber camp experiences and remnant exposure, are often awed in contemplating that dramatic brief time in history when brave—foolhardy, men—and a few women took to the big woods with hand tools to bring down the most glorious and awesome crop the land ever produced.
In its brevity—roughly fifty years from the 1870s to the 1920s, the lumber camps were where the action and the money was, big money for the camp owners and living wages for the lumberjacks who survived the very dangerous work. Phyllis’s father was one in a Canadian camp; and the keeper’s growing-up time was replete with family stories of predecessors’ lumber camp experiences. It left him with a religious-like respect for the time and the people and the places. He once wrote a feature for the Milwaukee Journal about loving the huge remnant pine stumps he stumbled onto, and lingering in a former lumber camp site often ate up hours of trout fishing time.
The keeper’s book–“TREESON, An Apology to the Trees” that went to make the paper his drivel was printed on, might well be revised and used by the old lumberjacks: “We’re sorry about those millions of giant majestic plants, but if we had it to do over again we would likely take them down in a chainsaw frenzy.”
“TREESON……” is available from Amazon or from the keeper for $10 plus shipping at billstokesauthor.com.
