I have just returned from a little impromptu farewell tour in the
lumber camps toward Lake Superior. It was my idea to wade around in the
snow for a few weeks and swallow baked beans and ozone on the one-half
shell. The affair was a success. I put up at Bootjack camp on the raging
Willow River, where the gay-plumaged chipmunk and the spruce gum have
their home.
Winter in the pine woods is fraught with fun and frolic. It is more
fraught with fatigue than funds, however. This winter a man in the
Michigan and Wisconsin lumber camps could arise at 4:30 a. m., eat a
patent pail full of dried apples soaked with Young Hyson and sweetened
with Persian glucose, go out to the timber with a lantern, hew down the
giants of the forest, with the snow up to the pit of his stomach, till
the gray owl in the gathering gloom whooped and hooted in derision, and
all for $12 per month and stewed prunes.
I did not try to accumulate wealth while I was in camp. I just allowed
others to enter into the mad rush and wrench a fortune from the hand
of fate while I studied human nature and the cook. I had a good many
pleasant days there, too. I read such literary works as I could find
around the camp and smoked the royal Havana smoking tobacco of the
coo-kee. Those who have not lumbered much do not know much of true joy
and sylvan smoking tobacco.
They are not using a very good grade of the weed in the lumber regions
this winter. When I say lumber regions I do not refer entirely to the
circumstances of a weak back. (Monkey-wrench, oil can and screwdriver
sent with this joke; also rules for working it in all kinds of goods.)
The tobacco used by the pine choppers of the northern forest is called
the Scandihoovian.
I do not know why they call it that, unless it is because you can smoke
it in Wisconsin and smell it in Scandihoovia.
When night came w: would gather around the blazing fire and talk over
old times and smoke this tobacco. I smoked it till last week then I
bought a new mouth and resolved to lead a different life.
I shall never forget the evenings we spent together in that log shack
in the heart of the forest. They are graven on my memory where time's
effacing fingers can not monkey with them. We would most always
converse. The crew talked the Norwegian language and I am using the
English language mostly this winter. So each enjoyed himself in his own
quiet way. This seemed to throw the Norwegians a good deal together. It
also threw me a good deal together. The Scandinavians soon learn our
ways and our language, but prior to that they are quite clannish.
The cook, however, was an Ohio man. He spoke the Sandusky dialect with
rich, nut brown flavor that did me much good, so that after I talked
with the crew a few hours in English, and received their harsh, corduroy
replies in Norske, I gladly fled to the cook shanty. There I could
rapidly change to the smoothly flowing sentences peculiar to the Ohio
tongue, and while I ate the common twisted doughnut of commerce, we
would talk on and on of the pleasant days we had spent in our native
land. I don't know how many hours I have thus spent, bringing the glad
light into the eye of the cook as I spoke to him of Mrs. Hayes, an
estimable lady, partially married, and now living at Fremont, Ohio.
I talked to him of his old home till the tears would unbidden start, as
he rolled out the dough with a common Budweiser beer bottle, and poured
the scalding into the flour barrel. Tears are always unavailing, but
sometimes I think they are more so when they are shed into a barrel
of flour. He was an easy weeper. He would shed tears on the slightest
provocation, or anything else. Once I told him something so touchful
that his eyes were blinded with tears for the nonce. Then I took a pie,
and stole away so that he could be alone with his sorrow.
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He used to grind the coffee at 2 a. m. The coffee mill was nailed up
against a partition on the opposite side from my bed. That is one reason
I did not stay any longer at the camp. It takes about an hour to grind
coffee enough for thirty men, and as my ear was generally against the
pine boards when the cook began, it ruffled my slumbers and made me a
morose man.
We had three men at the camp who snored. If they had snored in my own
language I could have endured it, but it was entirely unintelligible
to me as it was. Still, it wasn't bad either. They snored on different
keys, and still there was harmony in it--a kind of chime of imported
snore as it were. I used to lie and listen to it for hours. Then the
cook would begin his coffee mill overture and I would arise.
When I got home I slept from Monday morning till Washington's Birthday
without food or water.