Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

The Kitchen Table

That night I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold and did the math the way I do it all day at work.

I am a log truck dispatcher. I have been for eleven years. I sit in a little office at a trucking outfit on the highway north of Coos Bay and run fourteen trucks to landings all over the Coast Range.

I know what a load of fir is worth. I know which buyers pay and which ones stall. I know every gyppo logger from Bandon to Reedsport and most of their wives.

So I knew that thirty-one thousand dollars for twenty-two acres of thirty-five-year-old fir was a giveaway. Even in a bad market, it should have been several times that.

Brody had sold it fast and cheap to the first small outfit that would cut a check by Friday. And now the money was in a house.

I could have called a lawyer. I thought about it for a long time that night. A lawyer could have taken him to court over what he did as the boys’ manager, and maybe in three or four years somebody would see some of that money again.

But I also knew what three or four years of that would cost. It would cost lawyer fees I did not have. And it would cost my boys a father they still loved, every holiday, every ballgame, for the rest of their growing up.

And the hillside could not wait three years.

Coast Range ground is steep and the rain is serious. A fresh clear-cut with nothing on it starts to move. I had seen it on other people’s ground, the brush coming in so thick nothing could get started, the soil sliding into the creek below.

The planting season on the coast runs from about January to the end of March, while the ground is cold and wet. After that, the seedlings dry out and die in the ground.

If nobody planted that hill this spring, it would be a whole lost year. Brush would take it. Some of that slope might be in the creek by next winter.

I sat at that table until after midnight. Then I wrote one line on the back of an envelope.

Spring break. Nine days. Twenty-two acres.