Bonner Incident (2 page)

Mr. Mike passed when the book was three-quarters done, but it was fully outlined. We would just go over dialog, scenes, and characters. We had both decided Agent Moore needed a new name, but Mr. Mike left before we came up with a good one, so it will stay the same. Mr. Mike even wrote, by hand, a chapter and had the audacity to ask if I would mind typing it up for him. I almost called Tina on that one so she could chew his butt. It was important to him to say something about the rest of the crew and a character he always wanted to put in a story, Eddie Shore. This was the opening for other books we’d talked about and made notes on. After that chapter he wrote, he expanded scenes in other chapters and almost wrote another chapter, again, all by hand.

Yes, we did talk and make notes about a sequel, but I don’t know if I can ever do it. Maybe years from now, but don’t hold your breath. When I think about Joshua, Gene, Ben and the others in the book, I can see Mr. Mike sitting across from me with a huge grin and my God, does it hurt to continue this without him. When I wake up and crank the generator, I look at the phone, missing his call about new ideas.

The only reason I didn’t close the book down and walk away is I know how much it meant to him and I can’t be a sissy boy and not complete this book for him. I can do anything for a buddy, but missing him is the hardest.

This is for Mr. Mike from me.

Mr. Mike, the day you asked me why I now called you ‘My brother’ and not just ‘brother’ anymore, I told you I call friends ‘brother’, I call buddies, ‘my brother’. When I told you a friend will help you move a couch, a buddy will help you move a body and I would move a body for you. You told me you were honored that I thought so much of you.

I wish I had told you then Mr. Mike, it was I who was honored to have a buddy like you. I wanted to tell you that day and several other days later, but didn’t want to look like a sissy and I didn’t say it. I hope you know that now, I miss my buddy.

The first week in January that I asked you about a distance only a logger would know because I wanted to add in that chapter with his family so Joshua could tell the others in the book how close he would come to the house, you told me about Section 19.

Watching you talk about loggers’ paradise, Section 19, where loggers go when they die, I was blown away seeing the exhilaration in your face. One square mile of old growth timber where you fall trees all day long and when you wake up the next morning, they’ve all grown back and you just crank your chainsaw enjoying the work and doing it all over again.

I know you’re there now and one day I will see you again. I hope you won’t mind if I cut trees with you once again and at times just stop and watch. I don’t think I will ever see another master until I get to your Section 19. Even if I do, they won’t be you Mr. Mike, the best buddy. I’ve had very few buddies in my life, but you were one of the best, my only regret - I didn’t meet you sooner.

I will miss your stories and your willingness to share your knowledge with this Louisiana boy. I swear to you, I will put this book out and I know you see now how much you meant to me and others. It is ironic that we talked about what Tina and I would do if you passed after this book was released (Damn it Mr. Mike, that was supposed to be years from now. You said you would live to 102.) and your granddaughters will know.

Keep a chainsaw ready for me Mr. Mike, for when we meet again. You were a lot of things to many different people who loved you. To me, you were a mentor, teacher, coach, confidante and buddy and most of all, my brother.

I love ya, Mr. Mike, my brother, but I’m going to punch you in the mouth when I see you for leaving us like that. Susan told you to stop that. I’m sure you’re going to punch me back because I know you; you laughed your ass off about it when you landed in front of the Pearly Gates. Falling massive timber all your life and you go out of this world by a freak accident, I know when you landed at the Pearly Gates, you were rolling on the ground laughing.

After our tussle, I’ll grab my saw and you can show me what you always wanted and loved, cutting down big timber.

When the day is done, you can share your stories with me again as we wait for Section 19 to grow again.

Farewell, my brother, you will be missed and until that day, I love ya.

Your Tom.

To the reader, I wrote the above Introduction the day after I found Mr. Mike and waited six months before continuing the story, it just hurt too much then. It still hurts reading the notes he made and my notes when we talked, but I made a promise and a buddy will always keep his promise. I wanted to take out that introduction but Tina refused, even grabbing a hammer to prove her point. In the quarter of a century I’ve been with her, I’ve never seen that look in her eye. I don’t know what she was going to do with the hammer, but I wasn’t about to find out. So as you can see, that introduction stayed.

This is the longest introduction I’ve ever written and I did it to let the world know a great man had passed. At his life celebration, I met all the people that called him a friend and there were a lot of them. I knew all their names but had never seen their faces.

I’ve met his granddaughters several times but hell, as much as I’ve heard about them, I felt I knew them and watched them grow up.

The title came from Mr. Mike just a week before he passed. For three days, we talked about the title and had over a dozen good names. It was as I was leaving to start writing; Mr. Mike opened the door for me and said, “Hey Tom, I just got an idea, ‘Bonner Incident’. I like that.”

Since it was our brainstorming session I had notebooks and luckily, I stopped and wrote it down right then, yes, because I would’ve forgotten it and Mr. Mike didn’t write it down after I left. I know because I have the notebooks I gave him to make notes in.

I hope you enjoy this story and, yes, before any readers start asking, Joshua is based around Mr. Mike’s life. When we started working on the book, I asked Mr. Mike if we could do that and he just grinned and said, “Hell yeah, that is awesome.”

Glossary

Turn
- One bunch of logs of tree length pulled to the landing.

Round
- One complete trip to the mill and back by the log trucks.

Nose-bag
– Lunch box.

Skidding
– drag a ‘turn’ of logs to the landing.

Wrappers
– Cables with a six-foot section of chain on each end for binding loaded logs on the trailer.

Grapple
– Hydraulic operated claw-like device for picking up logs.

Hahn Processor
– Large stationary machine with grapple arm, conveyer, delimber and cut off saw.

Grapple Skidder
– Articulating large 4x4 tractor with a small dozer blade on the front and hydraulic grapple on the back.

Crummy
– any vehicle that transports the crew to the job site.

Scrench
– Combination ‘T’ shaped bar wrench screwdriver/socket wrench combo (chainsaw tool).

Choker
– cable for hooking to logs for skidding. Various length and diameters with a knob on one or both ends or an eye on one end with a ‘Bell’ latching device that slides up and down the cable to cinch around logs to form a self-tightening snare to ‘choke’ the log for skidding.

Landing
– The area where logs are brought to be processed and loaded.

Deck
– Pile of logs stacked and ready for loading or at the mill.

Crawler
– Large tracked bulldozer with a large blade and hydraulic winch on the back. Used for road building and skidding logs.

Cutter
– the guys that saw down the trees with chainsaws. Also regionally called sawyer, faller, single jack, or log cutter.

Winchline
– wire cable of larger diameter than the choker being used that the chokers are attached to and winched to the back of the dozer to be skidded to landing. Usually a hundred feet long.

Link
Belt
– Brand of cable Log Loading machine can be converted to a line skidder.

Madill
Tower
– Brand of high lead tower ninety feet tall.

NDAA
- National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a United States federal law specifying the budget and expenditures of the United States Department of Defense. Each year's act also includes other provisions.

High
Lead
– A system of logging clear cuts where a central tower is erected and logs are skidded to the base of the tower using a large cable with a smaller cable attached to haul the rigging with chokers back to the choke setters. Powered by a stationary diesel engine with cable drum winches at the base tower.

Rigging
- any number of different types of equipment to attach chokers to winch lines.

Chapter One

Driving slowly up the dark, winding, mountain road, Joshua gave a quick glance over at his thirteen-year-old son, William. William’s head bobbed with his eyes closed as the truck bounced along the road. Reaching up as he moved his eyes back to the road, the glare of the headlights started catching regular patches of snow, Joshua stroked his bushy black beard that had a few streaks of gray like his thick shoulder-length hair.

Glancing at the clock on the dash, Joshua sighed seeing it was 3:40 a.m. “We should’ve had breakfast on the go,” he said glancing again at William.

Jerking his head up and blinking his eyes, William looked around seeing it was pitch black outside the cab. “Huh?” he said looking over at his dad.

“I said we should’ve got our breakfast to go,” Joshua grinned.

Blinking and clearing the sleep from his eyes, William saw his thermal coffee mug in the center armrest. Grabbing it and flipping the top open, he glanced over at his dad. “I was finished in five minutes,” he said taking a tiny sip then smacked his lips from the scalding liquid.

“Just so you could go back to sleep,” Joshua laughed.

“So?” William said with a shrug. “I can’t drive the truck and I can put my time to better use.”

Reaching over, Joshua patted William’s leg. “You need more days off from school. Getting up at six is making you soft.”

Putting his mug back in the holder, William looked over at his dad. “Humph, my buddies can’t even get up at six regularly and when I go to work with you, I get up at two-thirty, when most are just going to bed.”

“That’s called being a man,” Joshua said as William stretched out.

William grinned and looked over at his dad. “Yeah and I’m here,” he said. “If I’m not working, I can sleep. Everyone in your crew does the same thing.”

Driving around a switchback, Joshua shook his head. There was a lot of snow on the ground but nowhere near what there should be for the middle of April. “I’m just messing with you, son,” Joshua said hoping the weather would hold till he got this job done. The contract with the Forestry Service clearly stated, ‘Job must be complete and site cleared before bare ground exposed’.

Hearing his dad’s voice change, William looked over. “I know you’re messing with me, Dad. I was just messing back with you,” he said. “Something wrong?”

“Snow’s melting too fast, contract says the job has to be done before it’s gone,” Joshua said, rounding another switchback with the massive mud grip tires on the truck throwing up snow as they dug down.

“Hey, the Forestry Service came to you, Dad. Nobody wanted this bid,” William scoffed. “You started the day after you took the contract, so they can deal with it.”

Spotting a deer up ahead in the headlights, Joshua slowed, making sure the deer wasn’t suicidal. For some reason, the last three deer he’d hit, they had charged right at his truck and he’d even had one run into the back of his truck. “It’s not that easy anymore, son,” Joshua mumbled as the deer turned and bounced up the mountain.

Speeding back up to a whopping fifteen miles an hour on the now snow-covered road, Joshua glanced again at William. He could remember sitting in that spot when his dad drove the truck to the logging site. Joshua had started logging with his dad when he could pull a choker and move fallen branches. Before he could even walk, Joshua’s dad had sat Joshua in his lap as he ran the loader. Forty-five now, Joshua and the rest of his crew were the last of the old-time loggers.

When his dad died, getting caught by a widow-maker tree, a tree top that was broken off and leaning against another tree, Joshua took over the family logging business at twenty-eight. It was one of the last small operations, and compared to the big logging companies and mills, they were tiny.

With only eight employees and himself, Joshua’s company took the small jobs that didn’t pay enough for the large companies to take. Like the contract he was doing now, it was only a hundred and fifty-eight acres but it was a selective cut, meaning only marked trees were to be taken. The site was in a small valley and ran up the sides of the mountains on each side. What made the job really suck, there were two small streams that met in the valley, almost in the middle of the contract area.

Each stream had a fifty foot ‘green’ area on either side that couldn’t be disturbed, and the only place you could cross was where the Forestry Service had marked. Logs had to be placed in the stream to drive over, then removed when the job was done. Joshua really didn’t have a problem with that, but he had seen another owner of a small operation several years ago bankrupted by the EPA for allowing a tree to fall in the stream.

“They keep adding rules to make the job harder,” Joshua finally said as William stared at the side of his face. “When I complete this contract with all the regulations, I’m barely coming out ahead.”

“I know, Dad,” William said, looking out the front window. He had been coming to jobs with his dad for several years but only in the last two, had his dad allowed him to work. Just in his short time there, William had noticed changes on how his dad and the crew logged. “You would think people would get pissed about paying stupid prices for lumber and tell the government to stop.”

“Why?” his dad shrugged. “We can import lumber cheaper than it can be cut here with all the rules. If they would relax them, we could bring lumber prices back down.”

Not knowing how to respond, William just sighed. “You aren’t going to have to lay off anyone, are you?”

Slowing down, Joshua turned to look at the worried expression on William’s face. “No, son,” he said, glad that his son understood to always treat your employees better than yourself. “That’s why I took this job before heading to the Olympic Peninsula in June. This was going to keep us afloat long enough to keep everyone’s paycheck rolling.” Many in Joshua’s crew had been with him for decades. He never had to advertise a job opening, men begged to be part of his small company. His newest employee was Alex, and Alex had been with the company for six years.

“So, the new equipment isn’t hurting us?” William asked.

“Whew,” Joshua moaned just thinking about that. The last few years had been tough on equipment for him. The dozer broke and the cost to repair it wasn’t worth it, so two years ago, he’d forked up the quarter of a million for a new John Deere Forestry Crawler. Which just meant that it was a dozer with a tough roll cage and big ass winch on the back, to pull logs off the side of steep hillsides. That same year, one of the semi’s he used to haul logs and equipment was hit by another big rig, totaling it out.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the truck had been hauling one of his two log skidders. A huge four-wheeled monster of a vehicle that had an articulating arm on the back with a grapple, to grab logs and pull them to the landing where the logs were loaded on trucks. Since the truck, the flatbed trailer, and the skidder were ten years old, the insurance hadn’t come close to paying what they were worth.

He did find a nice used semi which he beefed up with the crew, turning it into a log truck, but couldn’t find a nice used skidder. So, he bought a John Deere 948L, which cost two hundred grand. Then, his other skidder had been crushed last year in Canada by an old growth tree.

A job had come up in Canada harvesting old growth, trees circumferences that were measured in yards, not feet. Like any true logger, Joshua jumped at the chance. It was a subcontract, working for a large lumber company. It wasn’t one of his crew that had crushed the skidder; it’d been one of the newer generations of loggers that the old timers called ‘machine operators’. The new generation didn’t fall trees, they just cut them down. A logger falls trees, putting them where he wanted to. A machine operator cuts them down, not caring how they land. 

Luckily, the skid operator had been helping to hook up a choker for the dozer when the machine operator had cut down a six-foot-diameter tree thirty yards away. Unfortunately, the tree was two hundred and forty feet tall and had crushed the skidder. Needless to say, Joshua had to visit the John Deere dealership again.

Ben, his foreman, had to be held down on the spot and his chainsaw taken away because he was going to kill the machine operator. Ben had worked for his dad and they had known each other all of their lives. Most of the crew was built lean and hard from the tough work. Not Ben, he looked like a muscle-bound cartoon character with a shaved head and red goatee that hung down to his chest.

Looking at William, Joshua smiled. “We’re making the payments and if we get picked up again for Canada this year, I should be able to get one close to being paid off.”

“I’m glad,” William said with relief. He looked at everyone on the crew like members of the family.

Topping a rise, Joshua pulled into the valley and over to the landing. “How about you run the loader until the crew arrives?” Joshua said turning the truck off.

“Really?” William cried out.

“You have to learn to run it by yourself someday,” Joshua said grabbing his mug. “Just don’t get in a rush and you’ll do fine.”

“All right!” William sang out pushing open his door.

Joshua grinned as he climbed out and opened the backdoor of the quad cab, grabbing his white hardhat and radio. He looked over to see William yank his backdoor open and grab his hardhat with a wide open smile. Grabbing his gloves, Joshua shut the door and headed over to the loader.

The loader looked like a big excavator but had a huge claw to grab logs instead of a bucket. With the exception of the other semi, it was the oldest piece of equipment at ten years old and hadn’t been paid off that long.

Walking over to the loader with William beside him, Joshua held the flashlight under his arm as he clipped the radio on his belt with the hand-held microphone clipped to his jacket and put the earpiece on his ear. After the episode of a skidder getting crushed, Joshua made everyone wear and carry a radio. He knew that his crew knew what they were doing, but he wanted them to be used to wearing it always when they worked around others.

The last few yards, William took off, throwing snow up, jumping on the tracks of the loader and opening the door with the cab light coming on. Climbing in, he sat in the chair and turned on the glow plugs. Joshua climbed up and stood on the track, grinning at William’s excitement.

“When you get this truck loaded, I’ll bring up the other one,” Joshua said nodding at the semi parked beside the loader. “Watch what you’re doing and I’m going to start the equipment up. First things first, we’ll have to extend the trailers, okay?”

“Okay, Dad,” William said almost vibrating. He had run the loader with his dad a lot, but never by himself. Seeing the plug light go off, William turned the key, firing up the big machine.

Closing the door, Joshua jumped off the track as William let the loader warm up. When William cut on the huge lights that were mounted on every side of the roof of the loader, the landing was bathed in light. Joshua turned off his flashlight and walked across the landing, the area where the logs were loaded up.

Climbing up on the first log truck with its trailer folded up like it was riding piggyback, Joshua started it up and got on the radio. “Okay Will, remember how I showed you last Saturday. Gently reach down with the grapple and grab the trailer strap.”

The arm of the loader slowly moved and William almost panted in anxiety as the boom lowered. He managed to grab the strap on the second try which did boost his confidence. “Pull back on both levers and pick up the trailer,” Joshua said over the radio.

As soon as the trailer cleared the bunks on the log truck, Joshua pulled forward and grabbed his microphone. “Okay, now gently lower the trailer.”

Once the trailer was on the ground, Joshua backed up to the trailer reach. Setting the brakes, he jumped out and hooked up the trailer. “Will, open the grapple and swing it around,” Joshua said, hooking up the air brake lines to the trailer and pulled the reach pin. “Good job son. Go ahead and start loading.”

Seeing the first logs coming, Joshua headed over to the skidder parked beside the Hahn Processor. Joshua frowned upon hearing his boots making a slushing sound and not a crisp squeak from snow.

“I only need ten days,” he murmured walking between the six feet tall, three feet wide tires. Using one of the massive paddle tire lugs like a step so he could get to the stairs, Joshua climbed up and opened the door. After waiting for the glow plugs to shut down, he cranked it up.

Leaving it running, he climbed out to see William loading the first of the logs on the trailer. Standing on the deck of the skidder, Joshua chuckled as he watched the loader’s arm move almost timidly, placing the forty-foot logs on the truck. As William placed the logs gently on the trailer, Joshua shut the skidder’s door and climbed down. “Need to tell him that he doesn’t need to be that gentle.” 

After starting up the skidder, and dozer, Joshua headed over to the log truck that William was loading. Even though he would be finished by now, William was only halfway through. But to William’s defense, Joshua couldn’t recall ever seeing logs placed that neatly on a trailer.

Starting the other log truck and leaving it to warm up, Joshua ran back as William put the last load on, filling the trailer. Jumping in, Joshua moved the semi out of the way and moved the other over to be loaded. “Just like the last one, William,” Joshua said into the radio as he backed the second log truck up to the landing.