71 Give Me a Break Richard

The spring of ’64 had arrived before I knew it and I had not yet lined up a summer job. Who should show up a few days before classes were over but Richard Williams an acquaintance of mine from my Laurelwood days. He had found a job falling trees for Web and Lewis, two gypo loggers in Idaho. It was out of the small town of Fairfield not far from Mountain Home Idaho and in a little valley called Camas Prairie. Because it was at the five thousand foot level the main industry was hay farming. Even though Fairfield was the largest town in the county it only had a population of about four hundred people. This meant that it did not yet have a bank, but it did have a small grocery run by a friendly guy by the name of Joe Baker where you could buy most anything. Most of the houses in town however had the traditional out house at back.

So began another summer in the woods falling trees, but this time with a partner who it turned out did not have what was needed to pull it off. Richard had bought a brand new power saw but it takes more then a new saw and a falling contract to make any money. You have to be able to keep your saw running, plus fall the odd tree, and Richard was challenged on both accounts. Richard did cut the odd tree but how to operate a power saw and keep it running was beyond his capability. He was always running back to town to get some needed supply that he had forgotten, or fix his saw. We finally changed our financial arrangement to reflect his incompetence as a faller.

I realized that it would be a mighty long summer with just Richard as a roommate so after work that first Friday I was out of there, and racing for College Place and the love of my life. I didn’t stop until I was snuggled up beside her in College Place, six hours later.

Sunday morning however I loaded her and the kids up in the car and put the few things we had in a trailer and off I went back to Fairfield. You should have seen Web’s surprise when I showed up with the whole family Sunday evening looking for a place to put Sandy and the two kids. He didn’t boot us out but it was obvious that we now had to find another place to stay.

Well, we had arrived, but where to stay? The town of Fairfield had no places for rent, but we at last found a house, that by today’s standards would not be rentable, but believe it or not, someone rented it to us. There was a large hole through the floor in the living room where the previous occupant had chopped wood, the house was beyond description, but it did have a bathroom, which most of the houses in town didn’t have. After a few trips into Mountain Home for stuff to fix it up it became just about livable. When you are young and in love, livable as a term has a totally different meaning then when you are fifty.

We finally had a place but we also had Richard, whom Sandy was not to tickled to board, but poor Richard needed some place to stay and Web was not to happy about him staying with him, so Sandy relented and Richard moved in with us.

It seemed most of our earnings went to buy food at Joe Baker’s grocery store, that is when we occasionally got paid. The difficulty was that even though Joe was “an all right kinda Joe,” he didn’t trust us enough to give us credit, so it was sometimes nip and tuck as to where the nest meal was coming from.

One of the funniest things of the summer was when Richard after work one Friday decided to get his haircut at Sam the Barber’s. As Sam’s shop was right next to the pub and there wasn’t a rush for haircuts in Fairfield, Sam had a convenient place to spend his downtime. When Richard walked in for a haircut that Friday, it must have been an extremely slow day for Sam. One look at Richard’s hair after Sam’s attempted efforts and you actually felt sorry for Richard, I swear if a rat had chewed it off it would have looked far better. Richard’s only hope was to plead with me to at least try to even it up so he wouldn’t be embarrassed to go to church the next day. I must say I didn’t do too bad a job; I may have missed my calling.

It was a very busy summer without much time for play as we arose by 4:30 or 5:00, usually starting our saws by 6:00 am, stopping only to fill our gas tanks. I treasured the thirty minutes I took off for lunch. I ate for fifteen minutes and napped for fifteen minutes and then it was back to work.

It was not unusual for a snow squall to come flying through as we were working at 6500 ft elevation. What made it scary was that many trees had lightning scars and several times each week a thunder storm would go roaring through our cutting area. If one came to close, I stopped cutting until it moved on, as I didn’t want to incur the wrath of Thor, the god of thunder, and get lit up because my saw was in some tree that wasn’t to be cut.

The pay was good but the trees were very small and limby and we worked like dogs to get what little money we made. What dealt the final blow was that Web and Lewis folded up in August just after Richard and I had quite and we never got paid for about a third of our summer’s wages. This put the plan for another year of college on hold, so it was back to work, but this time it was back to GMG Logging where the living was easy and the pay was good. But it rained like crazy.