The Skidder on the County Road

“Thirty-five hundred. Cash. I’ll get there when I get there.”

That is what Wilbur Pagel said to his own stepson at a quarter after eight on a wet Wednesday morning in November, with eighty thousand pounds of truck and pine tipped into a ditch half a mile from the mill.

He did not ask whether Ivan was hurt. He did not ask whether the load had shifted, or whether anybody was hurt in another car. He named his number, said his piece, and hung up.

I know because Ivan had me on the other line through the truck’s speaker when he made the call, and I heard every word of it from the seat of our skidder, six miles away at the landing.

My name is Tilda Sauer. I am forty years old, and I run the skidder for a two-person logging outfit outside Rhinelander, Wisconsin. The other person is my husband, Ivan. He drives the log truck. I drag the wood.

I want to tell you about that morning, because people in town have told it a dozen ways since, and most of them have it bigger than it was.

It wasn’t big. It was just a long morning, and a few people deciding what kind of neighbors they wanted to be.

The Ditch

The rain had come in on Sunday and hadn’t let up. Three days of it, cold and steady, the kind of November rain that soaks the ground under the needles and turns the sand roads to grease.

We were cutting a forty of red pine off a town road north of us, a thinning job for a landowner who wanted his stand opened up. Good wood. Straight, clean, the kind of sawlogs and pulp the mill likes to see coming across the scale.

Ivan had pulled out of the landing at seven with a full load. He always takes the first load out early, before the school buses, and he always calls me when he’s crossed the scale so I know he’s fine.

At ten past eight my phone rang instead, and I knew from the first breath on the line that he wasn’t fine.

“Til,” he said. “I put her in the ditch.” I shut the skidder down so I could hear him. The engine ticked as it cooled. Rain ran off the bill of my green cap.

“Are you hurt?” “Cut my eye on the mirror bracket climbing down. It’s nothing. The truck’s not on its side. But she’s in deep.”

He’d met a gravel hauler on the county road a half mile short of the mill, right where it narrows by the culvert. Ivan gave him room the way he always does. He gave him a foot too much.

The shoulder there is sand over clay, and after three days of rain it was pudding. The moment his right wheels touched it, they went down. Steer tire, drives, and the trailer, one after the other, right to the hubs.

The truck was leaning toward the pines at an angle that made my stomach turn when I saw it later. The logs were still on, held by the stakes and the binders. But one more foot and she’d have gone over.

“How far are you leaning?” I asked. “Far enough that I’m not getting back in it till somebody’s holding it,” he said.

That was the first sensible thing either of us said that day, and it was his.