What follows is a selection from the opening chapters of BJ Omanson’s memoir Three Years on the Nowhere Road in which he recounts the strange and haphazard road that led him to a life of poetry— a life of inadequate means, manual labor, wilderness solitude and— as he was a high-school dropout— nothing whatever to do with writing programs or academia.
In November of 1972, married scarcely a year and having lost his job as a tree trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, Omanson made a drastic decision. He packed his uncle’s WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from the household nest egg and announced his intention to hitchhike out to the coast of Washington State, where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw. We pick up his story several days later, on a deserted two-lane road in an Oregon forest, sometime after midnight:
On a Dark, Deserted Highway, the Kindness of a Stranger
I have no idea how long I stood there on that Oregon highway in the deep forest, with just a ribbon of starlight overhead, but it must have been two or three hours at least. At last a car came along and, to my everlasting joy, it slowed down as it passed and pulled over. As I slipped in beside the driver, he asked where I was headed. “North,” I told him, “to the Olympic Peninsula. I’m looking for work.” He nodded and said I’d never get a ride on that highway at that time of night. “You can sleep at my place,” he offered, “and I’ll bring you back out in the morning. You’ll catch a ride then.”
He was a big man with a soft voice and a melodious accent I couldn’t quite place. Ordinarily I would have been wary of such an invitation. I had received my share of unwelcome propositions from lonely male drivers, but there was something about this driver that put me at ease. I thanked him and said I would be grateful for a night’s sleep in an actual bed. He nodded, and nothing more was said for the rest of the drive.
After a while, he turned off the road and down a long driveway that led to what looked like a large cabin or log house in the faint starlight. We got out and he walked up to a door, opened it, motioned me inside, then followed me in and turned on a lamp. What I saw took me aback. There was an olive jacket on a peg with a highway patrol shoulder patch, a Smokey Bear hat, a holstered pistol and two or three rifles, all mounted neatly along the wall. When I turned to look at my host, seeing him for the first time in the light, his features were plainly those of an Indian (which is what we called native people back then). If my face registered surprise, he chose not to notice. Since dropping out of high school and growing my hair long, I had been stopped and questioned by police on any number of occasions, for no more reason than that they didn’t like the looks of me. But that was clearly not the situation here. He showed me to a small bedroom, brought me a towel and soap, pointed out the bathroom and said he’d see me in the morning.
It was early when I awoke. I washed and dressed and walked down the hall till I found the kitchen. He was sitting at a wooden table, in a uniform this time, drinking coffee. A nice-looking native woman stood at the stove. “How do you like your eggs?” she asked me.
Twenty minutes later we were in his patrol car, driving down a forested two-lane. He let me out near an intersection. “There’ll be some log trucks along soon,” he told me. “One of them’ll pick you up.”
My First Ride in a Logging Truck
As my Indian host had promised, logging trucks were soon passing steadily by and, in no time at all, one of them pulled over. It was an ancient long-nosed model from the early fifties or late forties by the looks of it, with divided grill, divided windscreen and detached headlamps, running without a load. Crawling up into the narrow cab, with bare metal and sharp edges pressing from every side, hard ribbed-leather seats and a dashboard of small round dials, it was a lot like squeezing into the cockpit of a forties-era plane. I settled into my seat, seabag between my knees.
The driver, as lean and angular as his truck and wearing a heavy flannel shirt, looked to be in his late thirties. A small boy, maybe four or five and dressed in bib overalls, stood between the seats with his back against the cab window and his hand on his father’s shoulder. He paid me no mind at all but kept his eye on the road ahead, riding each bump and swerve with the practiced ease of a seasoned equestrian. I was reminded of myself at that age, standing on a tractor-axle beside my father as we drove out to the fields.
“Where you headed?” the driver asked. “Due west till I hit the ocean, then north,” I answered. “I’m looking for work.” “Well, you’re headed in the right direction, for sure,” he said. “Things are really boomin’ up there on the Peninsula.”
I settled back and immersed myself in the deeply forested country we were passing through, with stretches of whitewater rivers and dark green interiors glimpsed and gone. We passed through small seedy towns of one or two stoplights, gas stations and grocery stores and pickups parked in yards, and I watched the driver shifting up or down as he accelerated or slowed in and out of the small towns, smoothly working the clutch and two gearsticks in incomprehensible combinations, sometimes using both in a single shift and sometimes just one, in accordance with no logic that I could make out, but with all the finesse of a concert violinist, coaxing or nudging the great gears into place with gently cupped fingers or heel of his palm.
When he learned that I had never seen the Pacific Ocean, he said he would drive me over to the coast himself, though it was somewhat out of his way. And so he did, rolling all the way to Highway 101 where he turned and drove north until he spotted a pull-over on the coastal side of the highway. He and his boy got out with me and stood for a short time watching the waves come in. Then they piled back into the cab of the old truck with a wave and “Good Luck!” and the truck pulled out onto the highway, heading back the way they had come.
I filled my lungs with the clean salt air for a time, looking northwards at forest as far as I could see, and knew I had arrived in the true north country at last. My spirits were high, and I was eager to keep moving. I walked over to the highway, crossed to the northbound lane, lowered my seabag to the ground and stuck out my thumb.
Forks, Logging Capital of the World
Early on the following day I found myself approaching the little town of Forks, on Highway 101. The further north I had come through western Washington, up the Olympic Peninsula, the more evidence of logging I saw everywhere. But nothing could have prepared me for the miles of clearcut slopes that surrounded me as I approached Forks from the south. All I could think to compare it to was a war zone— a war against Nature herself. I thought I knew what to expect; I had seen logged-off areas before in other parts of the country, but nothing like this. This was logging on a major industrial scale, like No-Man’s-Land in the First World War, mile upon mile of indescribable carnage. It was deeply sobering.
And then I was in Forks, staring up at the mounted cross-section of a huge log which announced in bold letters: Welcome to Forks, Logging Capital of the World. Which it certainly was: with big gleaming Peterbilt, Kenworth and Mack logging trucks crawling bumper to bumper through the center of town, some of them hauling logs so large that a single log filled the entire trailer. The little town bustled with activity, crowded with hard-bitten men in red suspenders, hickory shirts, stagged loggers’ pants and heavy nailed boots. The whole Northwest was in the biggest logging boom in its history and the little town of Forks was its heart, full of raw swaggering energy and an air of brash assurance.
Notwithstanding my revulsion at the clearcutting, I found the atmosphere in Forks exhilarating. I was two months out of work, flat broke, and had a wife depending on me. I was desperate for wages and here, by God, was the place to find them. Beyond that immediate need, the prospect of such old-style labor in the woods, steeped in legend and peril, was transfixing. I felt a gnawing apprehension for what lay ahead, but knew in my bones I had come to the right place— that here I would find my young man’s great adventure at last— like Melville’s Ishmael looking down on the whaling town of New Bedford and a harbor full of whaling ships for the first time, inhaling deep draughts of the heady salt air and swallowing back the bile of his fear.
To a Camp on the Calawah
I had two friends, John and Mitch, who had come out to the Peninsula in late summer and they had been the source of my information about jobs in the Forks area. That they were camping somewhere along the Calawah River was all I had for directions.
Just north of Forks, where Highway 101 crossed the Calawah, a gravel road followed the river to the east, and that’s where I headed, walking along the riverbank for several miles with my seabag on my shoulder until a battered jeep with an open back seat pulled over to pick me up. I hopped aboard and found myself sitting under a rollbar next to a tall rail-thin fellow with long stringy black hair and goatee, dressed all in black and wearing a sort of stovepipe hat. He looked like something straight out of Gustave Dore’s London Scenes from the 1840s, a scraggly backstreet character who would stick a knife in your ribs without thinking twice. He was carrying something in a long leather scabbard that I took to be a fishing rod but which, in fact, turned out to be a loaded rifle. I was feeling a bit giddy, finally being so close to my destination after such an exhausting journey, and I took several deep breaths and made an innocent remark about the sheer sweetness of the air. My companion gave me a sideways glance. “New in town?” he smirked. — As it happened, he was headed to the same campsite I was. His name was Rick, if I remember correctly, and he worked in one of the many shake mills around Forks as a splitter.
We were dropped off about a quarter mile from the Klahanie Campsite and we walked in together. I recognized Mitch’s blue Dodge pickup and camper in one of the camping areas at the base of some of the biggest conifers I had ever seen in my life, and which I later learned were Sitka spruce. Mitch and his companions had built a spacious shelter of alder poles and plastic sheeting (“visqueen”). with a ridged roof and enough headroom that several persons could stand comfortably inside. The rangers were allowing them to remain there until the park closed for the season, in a week or two, at which time they were expected to take down the shelter and haul everything away.
There were chairs in the corners, a lopsided cast-iron woodstove that was lashed about with wire to keep it from falling to pieces, and a raised platform along the back wall which was just wide enough for four or five sleeping bags. It was not immediately apparent where I would be sleeping. All I knew was that I didn’t want to sleep outside in the rain. As it turned out, there was just enough room below the platform to crawl underneath and lay out my blanket. I set out my few books, kept everything else in my seabag which I used as a pillow, and imagined myself in the hold of a whaling ship.
Mitch said, “John’s in town. Let’s drive in and find him.” As Forks had just one main street, John spotted us almost at once and walked out into the street to flag us down. We stopped beside him and he peered in through the open window. “I just mailed you a letter telling you not to come,” he said. I opened the door and slid over and he got in beside me. Mitch turned the truck around and we headed back out of town. “What do you mean?” I asked him. John shrugged. “Summer’s over, winter’s coming— weeks and weeks of rain, by all accounts. Everybody’s leaving.” “Well I just got here,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere. What do I care about a little rain?” Mitch and John looked across me at each other and guffawed.
Back at camp, everyone settled in around the warm, steadily ticking stove and listened to the rain that just kept getting heavier. Someone was frying fresh meat in a skillet on the stove. “I hit a deer with the truck last week on the way into the mill, so we all skipped work and spent the day butchering,” Mitch explained. “Now we’ve got a lot of meat to get through before it goes rancid.” My spirits lifted. It looked as though I wouldn’t have to worry about supper.
Being early November, the cold rains of winter were starting to arrive and I was glad to have a place that was warm and dry. The old stove had been salvaged from the county dump. It smoked badly as the fire was getting underway, but once it was hot and drawing efficiently, it hardly leaked at all. The stovepipe ran through a hole cut in a sheet of corrugated tin which formed part of the wall behind the stove, so that the heat of stove and pipe were deflected from the plastic. It worked fine, and this simple stove-and-tin-sheet configuration was used in all the alder-framed visqueen shelters that I would see across the Peninsula during my time out there. Plastic palaces we called them. They weren’t beautiful, but they were about the only cheap shelter that would reliably keep out the rain, which was the primary concern, given that the average annual rainfall on the Peninsula was in the neighborhood of 150 inches, nearly all of which fell in the winter.
After supper that evening, I talked with several of the boys about where they were working, and what they did. Most worked in the shake mills around Forks, but John was working as a choker-setter for a little gyppo logging outfit. After what I had seen of the clear-cutting on the slopes, I wasn’t eager to join a logging crew, especially since much of the logging was occurring in old growth forests. Several of the boys mentioned tree-planting as a possibility, but I calculated I could make more working in a mill and that settled the matter in my mind.
Job Interview
My one and only job interview took place the next day at a little makeshift shake mill on the outskirts of Forks— owned and operated, as I later learned, by a family of rough-hewn mountaineers from West Virginia. It was one of the shiftiest-looking operations I had ever seen, with buzz saws, hydraulic splitters, and conveyors all housed in a sprawling ramshackle building that was nothing but a jumble of tin roofs without walls. Everything was open to the weather. It was out in the woods in a clearing of stumps, mud and battered pick-ups, an old logging truck, the deafening shriek of saws, and everywhere the clean, sweet fragrance of wind-blown rain and newly-cut cedar. My interview was the shortest I would ever have, consisting of a single question: had I brought my gloves? I said I had just hit town and hadn’t had a chance to pick up a pair. It wasn’t a good start. He looked me over for a moment, apparently judged me fit and strong enough, and told me to be there at sunrise the next morning. With gloves. He didn’t even ask my name.
Up before Dawn, a Logger’s Breakfast
The next morning, well before sunrise, I caught a ride into Forks with Mitch and a couple of the boys, all of whom had jobs in different shake mills around town. The three of them rode in the cab of the truck, and I bounced around behind them, on the ridged metal bed. It was about a ten minute drive from the campsite to the highway, following the Calawah most of the way, its whitewater rapids gleaming in the starlight. The air was damp, cold and bracing, and I felt more awake and alive than I had ever felt before, and more than ready for whatever the day would bring.
Once we came to the highway, we turned south, crossed the bridge over the Calawah, and were soon driving down the main street of Forks. Instead of heading out to a mill, we pulled into a parking spot in front of a low-slung café on the main street known as The Vagabond. We piled inside and settled into a booth. Even though the stars were still out, the café was already bristling with energy, with cooks hollering “Order up!” and waitresses hustling out great platters of flapjacks, eggs, sausages, slabs of ham and bacon, hashbrowns, steaming mugs of coffee, and clattering them down on tables and counters in front of big, suspendered, hungry men sitting shoulder to shoulder and eating with earnest intent. In the hour before sunrise, in Forks, Washington, this was clearly the place to be. “Gotta have a logger’s breakfast,” said Mitch, with a smack of satisfaction. The restaurant was all down-to-business and no-nonsense, as every man in there had a place to be and a time to be there, and they were all piling in the food like locomotive firemen shoveling coal.
Half an hour later we were back in the truck, and ten minutes after that my new life as a mill-worker got underway.
*
Read the rest of BJ Omanson’s four-part serial memoir:
- Part I, First Days on the Peninsula.
- Part 2, Working in a Shake Mill
- Part 3, A Solitary Winter in the Woods
- Part 4, Rambles with Robert Lee (coming June 5th, 2023)
BJ Omanson’s memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road (2023), was published by Monongahela Books and is available here.
Learn more about BJ on our Contributors’ Page.
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 4: Rambles with Robert Lee by BJ Omanson - June 4, 2023
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 3: A Solitary Winter in the Woods by BJ Omanson - May 22, 2023
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 2: Working in a Shake Mill by BJ Omanson - May 8, 2023