The Skidder on the County Road

The Call

Ivan patched me through so I could hear. He always does that when it’s money, so we decide together.

Wilbur picked up on the fourth ring. I could hear his shop radio behind him, the farm report.

“Pagel Towing.” “Wilbur, it’s Ivan. I’ve got the loaded truck in the ditch on the county road by the culvert, half a mile from the mill. Right side’s down to the hubs. She’s leaning. I need you to come pull me out.”

There was a long pause. I could hear Wilbur breathing through his nose.

“Loaded.” “Loaded. Red pine. I’ve got to cross the scale by one.”

“Well.” Another pause. “That’s a heavy recovery. Thirty-five hundred. Cash. I’ll get there when I get there.”

Ivan didn’t say anything for a second. I could hear the rain on his jacket.

“Wilbur, that’s the whole load.” “Then maybe you should’ve thought about that before you put it in the ditch,” Wilbur said. “Your dad was always in a hurry too.”

Then the line went dead. I sat on that skidder in the rain and I felt something go very cold and very still inside me. Not angry.

I’ve been angry, and this wasn’t that. It was more like the moment before you set a choke on a hung-up tree, when you can see exactly where it’s going to fall.

“Ivan,” I said. “Are you on solid ground right now?”

“I’m on the road.” “Stay there. Don’t get back in the cab. I’m coming.”

“Til, with what?” I looked down at the levers in front of me.

“With this,” I said.

The Machine

Our skidder is a used grapple skidder, older than our marriage, painted the same yellow every one of them seems to be. It weighs about fifteen tons.

It has a dozer blade up front, a grapple on the back, and a winch drum behind the cab with a hundred and fifty feet of five-eighths steel cable on it.

Thurman bought it secondhand the year before he died. Ivan bought it from Marjean after the funeral, on payments she let him set. We’re still paying it, mostly to the bank now, after we refinanced to put a new transmission in it two summers ago.

A skidder isn’t built for roads. It’s built to drag logs out of the woods to the landing, through mud and snow and over stumps.

It has big tires and articulated steering, and it goes about as fast as a brisk walk in high gear, maybe a little more.

But a winch is a winch. If you anchor a skidder right, with the blade down and the grapple set, it’ll pull more than it weighs.

I had pulled stuck trucks before, pickups and a forwarder once, on the landing. Never a loaded log truck. Never on a public road.

I was scared the whole six miles. The tire chains were still hanging in the shed, because the ground hadn’t frozen yet, and that was a mercy.

Chains on a skidder will tear up blacktop like a plow, and the county would have had something to say about it.

I checked the cable for kinks and broken strands, the way Thurman taught Ivan and Ivan taught me. I checked the chain and the hooks. I put on my orange vest over my canvas jacket. I turned on the flashers and put the slow-moving triangle in the back window.

Then I drove out of the landing onto the town road, and from the town road onto the shoulder of the county road, and I headed south.