The Skidder on the County Road

Why It Mattered

People who don’t log ask me why we didn’t just let the truck sit. Call it in, wait it out, eat the day.

Here is why. The mill buys on a quota. Each outfit gets so many loads a week, and each load gets a delivery window. Ours was Wednesday before one o’clock. Miss it, and the slot goes to the next outfit in line, and you’re back to waiting.

We’d waited all of October for that quota. We had a payment due on the skidder on the fifteenth, and we have a daughter who is twelve and needs new boots every time I turn around.

A load of red pine like that one, sawlogs and pulp together, comes out to around twenty-seven tons. After the stumpage we owe the landowner, it pays us somewhere near two thousand dollars. Fuel and insurance come out of that.

So three thousand five hundred dollars wasn’t a wrecker bill. It was more than the whole load.

And there was nobody else to call. Wilbur Pagel owns the only heavy wrecker for forty miles in any direction. There’s a rotator out of Wausau, but they’d charge the same price plus the miles, and they’d be three hours getting there on a good day.

A wrecker can charge what he wants out here. There is no board to call and no one to complain to. If you don’t like the price, you can sit in the ditch till the snow comes. Everybody knows that, and Wilbur knows it best of all.

Who Wilbur Is

I should tell you about Wilbur, so you understand I’m not writing about a stranger.

Wilbur Pagel is sixty-four. He has run Pagel Towing out of the same steel building on the highway since he was twenty. He is good at what he does.

I’ll say that plain, because it’s true, and because I’ve seen him pull a cattle trailer out of a frozen creek with a calm I envied.

Ivan’s mother, Marjean, kept his books when she was nineteen. Everybody in town knew Wilbur meant to marry her. Then a young logger named Thurman Sauer came in with a broken trailer hitch and a grin, and that was that.

Marjean married Thurman. She left the shop, went to the woods with him, and kept his books instead. They had Ivan the next year. Wilbur did not come to the wedding.

Thurman died when Ivan was twenty. A widowmaker branch, on a windy day, in a stand he’d cut a hundred times. Two years later Marjean married Wilbur, which surprised everyone and maybe her most of all.

I believe Wilbur loves her. I have watched him hold her coat. But he never once looked at Ivan without seeing Thurman, and he never forgave the boy for picking the woods over the shop.

When Ivan was twenty-four, Wilbur offered him a job driving the second wrecker. Ivan said thank you, but he was going to keep his dad’s truck running. Wilbur didn’t speak to him for most of a year.

That was eighteen years ago now. In all that time, Wilbur has never once called Ivan “son.” He has never come out to the landing. At Christmas, he hands Ivan a card with a twenty in it, the same twenty he gives the paper boy.

So when Ivan put that truck in the ditch, he knew exactly who he was calling, and I think part of him called anyway hoping this time would be different.

It wasn’t.