The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

Agnes

Agnes Tolliver is seventy and has been a widow for nine years. Her husband farmed with Nils’s dad. She lives alone in the white farmhouse on the county road, she still drives herself to church every Sunday in a Buick older than Torin, and she makes the best rhubarb pie in the county, which she will tell you herself.

Torin went to see her on his own. He asked me not to come. He wanted to do it like a man.

He came back an hour later with flour on his sleeve and a look on his face I had not seen since he was little.

“She said yes,” he said. “She said she’d been praying somebody would come ask, and she didn’t care for the man from the big outfit who came by in the spring. She said he talked to her like she was simple.”

“What did you offer her?”

“The going rate for stumpage. I looked it up at the county forestry office. And I told her I’d leave the oaks and the big white pine along the creek, and I’d keep the trails narrow, and I wouldn’t cut when it was wet so I wouldn’t rut her up.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she’d take a little under the going rate because her husband farmed with my grandpa. I told her no, ma’am. I told her I’d pay her the going rate, same as anybody. She said I was stubborn as a Lindgren.” He grinned. “Then she gave me pie.”

Nils went over with him that weekend and walked the forty with Agnes and the county forester, a young woman who marked the boundaries and the trees to leave. The forty was all old aspen, big and tall and starting to go punky in the middle, with a scattering of balsam and red maple and those oaks along the creek.

The forester stood at the edge of it and looked up.

“This is ready,” she said. “Past ready. This stand is fifty years old. It’ll come back thick as hair once it’s cut. Aspen wants to be cut.”

The First Day

School started the Tuesday after Labor Day. Torin was a senior. He had arranged his schedule so that he was done by twelve-thirty on most days, with two study halls at the end that his counselor let him take as work release.

I would leave at six-fifteen to pick up my bus at the garage in town. Torin would leave at seven-thirty for school. At twelve-thirty he drove straight home, changed into his work clothes in the machine shed, and walked across the hayfield to the skidder.

Nils taught him how to fell that first Saturday. Torin already knew how to run a saw, but there is a difference between bucking up a down tree and laying a seventy-foot aspen exactly where you want it. Nils stood back and watched him cut his notches and his back cuts, and told him once, and then stood back again.

By noon he had stopped telling him anything.

“He’s better at it than I am,” Nils said to me that night. He sounded a little sad and a lot proud, the way fathers do.

The way a cable skidder works, you back the machine toward the logs you have cut. You get off and drag the winch cable through the brush by hand.

You wrap a short chain called a choker around the end of each log, hook the chokers to the cable, climb back up, and winch them in tight against the back of the machine.

Then you drag the whole bundle out to the landing. You drop it, unhook every choker by hand, and go back for more.

It is hard, filthy, slow work. It is all climbing on and climbing off. A grapple skidder does the grabbing with a big claw and the operator never leaves the seat, but a grapple skidder costs ten times what that old Timberjack cost, and we did not have it.

Torin did not complain once. Not that day and not any day.