41 Tragedies in the Woods

It was just after Garth Leavens and his family had left and Gary was over working for dad on the north side of Read that Akeo, the youngest, of the Tanaka boys got hit with the haul-back line.  He had to be flown out to the Campbell River hospital where he strangled to death.  Akeo was working on the rigging when the haul-back caught him in the neck.  He did not know he was in the bite of the line and it just about took his head off.  Akeo’s death affected me more than that of anybody’s that I have known accept maybe that of my parents.  I moped around for weeks just thinking about it.  Their camp was just a little way down the passage from ours and we watched as the BC Airways plane flew by to pick him up.  Our concern turned to extreme sadness when we heard what had happened.  As their logging camp was a family operation like ours, we kindly looked after their camp while they mourned their loss and worked through their grief.

It seemed that tragedy comes in clusters, as it was shortly before Akeo’s death that Andrew Jenkings a nice portly old bachelor whose place we walked by every day on our way to school, got killed.  This shook us kids up quite badly as it was a school day and we were all at school when my uncle Erwin’s brother Roy, came by with several others, and we watched as they carried poor Andrew out on a stretcher.

Andrew had asked Jim Redfern his neighbor, who lived not far away; to help him cut some trees down for firewood.  Neither was particularly skilled in the falling of trees and especially with the type of stand they were working in. The stand of trees was very thick and the trees so close together that they held the tree from falling. This caused the trees to bend until they could bend no further. Suddenly the falling tree was flung back off it’s stump with such incredible force that it pulverized poor old Andrew into pulp, bouncing up and down on him and beating him in to an unconscious state from which he never recovered.  Roy’s description of what happened and how he had to pin Andrew’s tongue to his lip to keep his tongue from falling back and chocking him, didn’t help much to console me, and it was some time before I came to grips with that reality.

Life in a gyo logger’s world was not easy, but those that survived rose to the occasion and were better for it.