The Skidder on the County Road

The Six Miles

Six miles is nothing in a car. On a skidder, it’s most of an hour.

The rain had eased to a drizzle by then, but it was still coming, and the cab on our skidder doesn’t have a door on the right side anymore. Every truck that passed me threw a sheet of road water across my lap.

I kept to the shoulder wherever there was shoulder, and to the white line where there wasn’t. Most people slowed down and swung wide. A few honked. One man in a pickup with a deer stand in the bed gave me a thumbs up out his window.

I passed the church on the corner, the little white one with the steeple where Marjean plays piano on the second Sunday of the month. I said a short prayer going by. I said it out loud, because nobody could hear me over the engine. Lord, let it hold.

I don’t remember much else of the drive. I remember the smell of wet pine and diesel. I remember how cold my hands were inside my gloves, and how I kept flexing them on the wheel.

And I remember coming around the last bend and seeing our truck.

It was worse than I’d pictured. The red cab was tipped toward the trees at an angle that didn’t look like it could hold. The logs leaned with it. The right side of the trailer was down in the mud past the hubs.

Ivan was standing on the far edge of the road in the drizzle with his hands in his pockets and a strip of paper towel stuck to his eyebrow. He looked about twelve years old.

When he saw the skidder, his face did something I’ll keep for the rest of my life. It wasn’t relief. It was more like he couldn’t believe somebody had come.

Setting Up

I didn’t say much. There wasn’t time, and there wasn’t anything to say yet.

I pulled the skidder ahead of the truck on the shoulder, then swung the back end around toward his front bumper. I wanted a straight pull, or as near to straight as I could get, up and out of the ditch at an angle onto the gravel.

I dropped the blade into the gravel shoulder until the front tires lightened. Then I set the grapple down behind me, hard, and let the jaws bite into the bank at the edge of the ditch. With the blade and the grapple both down, that machine wasn’t going anywhere.

Ivan pulled the cable off the drum, walking it back to the truck. He found the front tow hooks under the bumper, ran a chain through both of them in a bridle, and hooked the cable to the middle so it would pull even.

“You want me in the cab?” he said. “I want you in the cab with your seatbelt on and the door cracked,” I said. “If she goes the wrong way, you get out the high side.”

He nodded. That’s how we talk to each other in the woods. Short.

It was past ten by then. That was when the car pulled up behind us.