Wild Life (14 page)

She was accustomed to the ironing board, which sat the floor imperfectly and shifted its weight from end to end with the shifting weight of the iron. She stood before the board with her hips wide, shifting her own weight from foot to foot without consciousness of it any more than she was conscious of the shifting board and the slight complaint of the wooden braces. The irons were nickel plated and polished, three heavy sadirons and the little sleeve iron ground by perfect machinery, every iron true, face-shaped, double pointed, though the detachable wood handle sometimes would release an iron without warning, and always would wobble in her hand, a loose motion on
the stroke and again on the pull, which she was no longer conscious of after so many years, the same irons, the same board, every Tuesday the ironing and mending, the women's shirtwaists and then the boys' overalls, the stockings and vests and the boys' blouses and shifts and plain shirts, and the women's skirts, the man's collarless work shirts.

On Mondays she washed and churned. On Wednesdays and again on Saturdays she scrubbed the white pine kitchen floor with a brush, sand, and soap she had made herself of hog fat, lye, and wood ashes. The boards in that floor didn't fit together as tightly as she would have liked, and the cracks were inclined to accumulate dirt and old crumbs of crackers and the dust of flour and cornmeal, which if it wasn't gotten up quickly would bring ants and mice; and as she sat on her shoes spreading a thin lake of water and brushing it hard across the boards and down into the cracks, she sometimes would think of the boys, the youngest two crawling on that floor as babies, how they liked to lick the crumbs from the cracks. Thursdays or Fridays she baked bread and pies, and on the other days or in other hours, and according to the season, sewed curtains, cushions, and lamp shades, made carpet from rags, tended to sick neighbors, took up and beat carpet, cooked the meals, made jell, cider, pickles, and preserves, cut stove wood, blacked the stove, painted the rain barrel, oiled the woodwork, planted and weeded the garden.

For some of these chores she had the help of one boy or another, but she considered the children in her care more trouble than relief. In truth, she had grown too set in her ways to turn over the work to clumsy hands. Her own child, a daughter, was long since grown, and though she was fond of the boys, the little boys especially, she tired of them readily and found her greatest comfort in the long quiet of schooldays, alone in the house. She was accustomed to the lonely and monotonous nature of housework, as she was accustomed to the loose handle of the iron, and seldom remarked on it.

The entire of her adult life had been lived in remote whereabouts, and inconvenience was something she took also as a matter of course. That women Outside enjoyed gaslights, municipal water, domestic plumbing, commercial ice, coal furnaces, steam radiators—this seemed to her quite unrelated to her own situation. Telephone lines had been brought to Chinook and Ilwaco; at Brookfield, she had
heard, the Meglers had an Edison graphophone with wax disc records and a morning-glory horn; in Grays River there was a bowling alley; at Altoona, Hans Peterson ran about the mouth of the river in a gasoline launch. That such things might make their way to her, here at the ragged edge of the Frontier, she found an interesting though airy hope, rather like a Utopist vision, something to be looked forward to in a vague way but not to be counted on. She had little confidence and less interest in the idea of Progress, not having noticed much improvement in people's happiness with the improvement of machinery.

She was fifty-two, with graying hair and weak eyes, a ready temper, and an implacable need for orderliness, both in her surroundings and in the daily and seasonal round of her work. The smell of clean pressed laundry, suggestive of starch and heat and soap, satisfied her in a way she could never have articulated.

She carried the bundles of shirts and overalls off to rooms in the house furnished with bureaus and dressers, and afterward, it being Tuesday, she retired to her attic room for a half-holiday. Her employer was a supporter of the eight-hour workday but had not made the leap from the general to the particular; the woman's work as a housekeeper and child-minder ended at seven o'clock in the evening, with Sundays and half-Tuesdays to spend at her discretion. Her secret habit, of a Tuesday, was to read the newspaper through and through while reclining upon her bed without stockings or corset.

While she read of a cap-makers' strike in New York, and of the prominent evangelists holding revival meetings in Portland, and of a rich woman in dread of being poisoned, the pressed and folded clothes took up the smell of the cedar shavings lying in white-waisting sachets in the dresser drawers. It was of course unknown to her that the smell of cedar carried in clean clothes would years afterward have the power to spark off long wordless flutters of memory in the boys—this woman who had once been their caregiver returning to them and streaming away from them as live coals will blow suddenly across the darkness on a flaw of wind.

I am continually amazed at the paucity of imagination where the loggers' naming of landforms is concerned, but Canyon Creek is a plain and apt call, the creek brawling down through a narrow basalt gorge and Camp 6 lying just where the gorge flattens somewhat and takes a wider stance. They have cleared out the trees on the near and easy ground, and now take their logs from five miles up the reach of the canyon and send them down to the camp through an arrangement of flumes not much less pretentious than a Roman aqueduct. At the catch basin, hallooing over the roar and spout of logs plunging off the end of the slideway, the men told me I should have trouble walking the flume, as the eight-inch catwalk is a precarious path even for a man, and in dirty weathers a flume tender will slip off every now and then and be killed or crippled. I told them even a woman may slip and be killed, but she would never tolerate dirty weather, and I climbed up to the walk and set off while their brains still scrambled for purchase. When they had got their gears moving, however, they sent a man climbing up after me, doubtless instructed to escort the helpless woman the entire five miles of the catwalk with an intent to ensure her safety, which of course had the effect of endangering it, as I then had to step out briskly to keep up appearances.

Logging of my acquaintance on the Skamokawa sloughs and creeks relies on the splash dam and the spring freshet to move sawlogs downhill, which has kept me from much experience of flumes, but I became acquainted in a hurry. The flume follows the creek's winding course, but being a man-made and wooden river, it clings by a miracle of modern technology to the high wall of the canyon, and the little plank catwalk follows the flume in such a way that the steep rushing trough is always at your hip, the water slipping by with the unremitting thump and scrape of sawlogs caroming hell-for-leather downstream, while catwalk and flume together bridge and rebridge the
creek and its shoots, offering at every hand giddy views down to the white rope of the mountain river, and ahead to spindling timbers supporting the next terrible spiderweb of trestle, the next oncoming curve leaping out over the abyss. Walking a flume is just the sort of brisk living as draws the blood right out of my head, and this of course raises Melba's old question: What could have possessed Homer to bring his Harriet up this high-way?

The fellow sent after me had the gaunt and sorrowful face, the pasty complexion of a Russian. I used up my supply of Russian on him and then, clinging to the flume, took a careful look behind in order to collect my reply. He stood at his ease on the skinny catwalk, his long arms clasped behind him on the handle of his peavey hook and his sorrowful gaze going past me, and at length said in plain English, “I don't follow, ma'am, but if you're swearing at me, then I ought to say this wasn't none of my idea.”

He was a flume tender, he said when we had made up our quarrel. He had the work of patrolling the lower half of the catwalk looking for jams or leaks, the bane of flume operators, and of clearing the jams or signaling if there was a break. A log will take a curve too fast and leap right out of the trough, he said, or jam up and divert the following logs over the edge of the flume and down; a turn of logs will pile up on a curve, and the weight of wood and dammed water will cause a flume box to stove in, in which case all the water and wood arriving from above goes spilling down in the canyon until the gap is discovered and the flume rebuilt.

This news of logs flying through the air did nothing to stiffen my manly nerve, but the flume tender himself, following along persistently behind me, was an unexpected comfort. He began by helpfully pointing out waste wood along the route of the flume, which I could glimpse for myself and which led to a tedious redundancy, inasmuch as there was sufficient lost lumber below us to build a dozen miles of trestle or an entire mill town complete with several dining halls and a dance pavilion. In any case I am accustomed to the waste of timber, as the creek banks below the splash dams of the lower Columbia are a tangle of stranded logs which must lie there until a bigger splash moves them along, or until such time as someone invents new machinery to lift them out.

But having a considerate nature, and having evidently guessed
or been told the point of my errand, he soon turned to encouraging tales of miraculous rescues and escapes: a baby which fell from its father's arms and flashed down on the flume, where it was snatched up safe in the hands of the surprised flume tender; a runaway train bearing nineteen loads of logs which came down the main line into Yacolt and, going off the end of the track, slid straight on down the county road, traveling fast and upright and gradually coming to rest without encountering a single dog, woman, child, or baby carriage. He supposed I would be relieved and comforted to hear that flumes transport not only the ordinary lumber and sawlogs and shingle bolts but every sort of article from crates of groceries to catches of fish, as well as the occasional injured party borne out to the hospital. Of course, if Harriet must be carried out of the woods with a broken leg, I will hope that she's also catatonic and senseless, for although the Canyon Creek flume is a short five-mile slide downhill at better than a mile a minute and the trail otherwise is a tedious and hard roundabout, I believe, for myself, if I fell on my axe, I should rather take my chances with gangrene and a slow painful jostle carried out on the backs of my fellow-men, than plunge down the flume in a boat having the shape and velocity of a sawlog.

We came at last to the flume tender at the upper end, who, when he'd gotten over his surprise at seeing a woman climbing up the catwalk, scrambled down like a monkey into the complicated geometry of the trestle and hung there while we passed single file over his head. The two men exchanged the most casual of greetings and lengthy summaries amounting to an All's Clear At Both Ends, and after we had passed by him, the monkey clambered up to the catwalk again and sauntered off downhill, giving the occasional drift-log a cautionary jab with his peavey hook.

My own dear flume tender, as I discovered from a chance remark, was a reader of newspapers, and when I heard this I turned our talk away from close shaves and perilous lifeboats—entirely away from the lurking but unspoken business of a child lost in the deep-woods. We enlivened the air with our fair knowledge of the world's doings and our opinions of how things were being conducted. We argued over the future of capitalism and prospects for the end of the Russo-Jap war, as well as the possibility that as men are more knowledgeable and more advantaged by technology, they may become more
rational, and whether this transformation—together with radium power—might bring about the millennium.

We had a vigorous discussion of the mind of the educated woman. Under the old regime, I told him, a woman would pledge her housekeeping and baby-tending services to a man, along with certain social gains and regular sexual relations, all in exchange for economic security. But intellectual development renders a woman less dependent on marriage for her physical support (which I have proven in my own life), and as women are permitted to read Herbert Spencer and work with calculus, there may come an end to their sewing on buttons fand embroidering pillow-slips.

I would not have been surprised if a rough and whiskered flume tender living way back in the wilderness had objected most strenuously to such an idea. The vast majority of men, even in these modern times, still require a lisping, clinging creature with a willingness to worship the masculine form. I have no doubt that such men as Homer Coffee or Melba's drunkard husband, Henry Pelton, fear women's access to higher education will create a race of monsters—unsexed creatures with clubbed hair and a blighting power. But the flume tender gave way before my arguments and offered his own mild opinion that a woman with a complete understanding of the clockworkings of the universe is a woman in closer touch with nature.

I wondered then, as I do now, if he might have been a man hiding his lamp under a basket, so to speak. It's well known that the remote logging camps are scattered with educated men—lawyers, doctors, teachers, men who have held important positions in business—who have turned to the hermit life after legal or personal calamity of one kind or another. I asked him nothing of that kind and offered him nothing of my own history: such is the Western way.

I sit now at the top of the flume—having shaken his hand and seen him back down the catwalk—refreshing myself with an apple and sandwich on a stump well apart from the furor of the logging, while I bring events up to date on these pages. On another sheet I have scribbled down the outline of a little story in which the hero is a flume tender of knightly attributes, driven into the wild West by tragic circumstances in the civilized East, and whose heroine is a pretty though stalwart girl, forced to cross miles of precarious and collapsing catwalk in order to save the life of her wounded beloved.