Happy reading....
Figure 1
- Dad and Mary Jean abt. 1926
Dad was born in a logging camp, Camp 5, in a chain of logging
camps owned by Simpson Logging ompany in the Olympic Peninsula. Nothing exists of this particular camp. But at one time, early in the 20th
century hordes of immigrants descended to live, work and raise their families
in these work camps. They were
communities of bunk houses, cookhouses complete with camp cooks, machine shops
for all their gear and outdoor latrines.
Figure 2
– Partial Map of Simpson Logging Company Camps
As you can see, there were many
Camp 5s in the Forests – Early Camp 5 is due North of Shelton on the
Skokomish. There is another Camp 5,
named “1900 Camp 5” which is due West of Shelton, near the circle marked “The
Big Tree”. But Dad was born in the Camp
5 a little to the West of that, along the dotted line that was the railroad
line, on the way to the last Camp in the wilderness that Simpson built, known
as “Grisdale.”
For Dad, a rambunctious boy, the
woods smelled like home. Even later in his
life, when I knew him, he was always happiest when in the middle of a fir
forest. The denser the canopy, the
deeper the green, the happier my old man.
Though happy is not an adjective
I can use much with Dad. When I was a
kid, Dad would disappear into our woods in the south pasture, about a 200 acre
wooded hillside where you could lose yourself in old growth forests, canyons,
and creeks. Every step in that forest
crunched as your boot sunk into decades of decaying needles. John and I would ride our ponies, sneaking behind
him and follow him to wherever he was off to.
We’d see our old man pull on his rounded toe logging boots, different
than the narrow-toed cowboy boots, and put on his red suspenders and metal hat,
and we knew he was headed to the woods, away from the flatland of cattle,
haying operations, irrigation. He would climb
into an old WWII Willy’s Jeep we had at the ranch – a Jeep so raggedy over the
years that as parts fell off, they just never got replaced. First it was the top that rusted out; then
the seats. Soon it was just a frame with
four wheels and a wooden platform over the top.
He’d climb into the Willy’s Jeep, drive to a clearing at the top of a
hill, then hike the rest of the way in.
He would sit down on an old rotting log or on top of one of the enormous
glacial rocks and stare out into space, unaware that his two youngest children
were watching his every move from atop our ponies.
Or so we thought. Later in my life, about junior high school, when
he needed money, he had to log a part of that hillside. One day he was working in the woods with his
skidder, a crazy machine whose front two wheels moved independently of the back
two wheels and is used to skid logs down hillsides. I was hiding behind some bushes and watching
him work with his machine. He nearly
backed the machine into me but turned around just in time to see me in the
bushes. He was startled, then his face
turned purple and he became enraged, jumping off the machine and coming after
me. I turned and ran, high-tailing it
out of his reach. Much to my surprise he
never said a word of it when we met that evening around the dinner table.
It wasn’t until many years
later, after he had died, and I was grieving his loss when I decided that I
needed to know everything about him. I
started to understand what went through his mind that day when he saw me spying
on him. All I knew about Dad was that he
was born in the woods, raised by unhappy parents and that he spent the second
World War as a Seabee in the South Pacific before meeting my mother, moving to
Oregon and beginning his life anew as a cowboy.
He never talked about his experiences in the Navy at all, and if it was
brought up, he would just shake his head and walk the other way.
The Seabees were a construction
battalion that were full of skilled labor that built airstrips and supply lines
on the chain of islands that we defended during the second World War. Some of the fighting that happened on those
islands were horrific. The Japanese dug
themselves into cave systems on some of the islands and had to be burned out
because they would not surrender. They
were taught to fight to the death.
From the official military
website: “In the North, Central, South
and Southwest Pacific areas, the Seabees built 111 major airstrips, 441 piers,
2,558 ammunition magazines, 700 square blocks of warehouses, hospitals to serve
70,000 patients, tanks for the storage of 100,000,000 gallons of gasoline, and
housing for 1,500,000 men. In construction and fighting operations, the Pacific
Seabees suffered more than 200 combat deaths and earned more than 2,000 Purple
Hearts. They served on four continents and on more than 300 islands.” When you dig into the story of how these
Seabees earned these sometimes posthumous awards you realize that although
they’re a construction brigade, they are constructing everything in the middle
of a raging war with enemy fire all around them. One example of the kinds of tasks they would
accomplish is the construction of the roads or bridges or airstrips necessary
for war as the war is being fought. For example,
a brigade would land on an undeveloped atoll on the trek towards Japan and the
fighting between the Marines and the Japanese would be heavy. In the midst of this fighting, the Seabees
would need to get the military wherewithal to the island. They would off-load their caterpillar
tractors in the surf and drive them up the beach and then (with the blades of
the caterpillars raised) move towards enemy positions. When they got close to the Japanese bunkers,
they would lower the blades until they were scooping as much sand and earth and
boulders as possible and then bury the Japanese alive in their bunkers, while
the Marines with wands of fire would burn any survivors or simply shoot them.
That day, when he saw me spying
on him, did he flash back to an episode of the Japanese hiding in the
bunkers? Was his rage directed toward
me, or directed toward an episode earlier in life that most likely scared the
hell out of him? Or did he think, ‘god,
I could have run over my child and killed her,” and he confused fear for my
safety and rage at me for just being there?
Or was it my mere existence that just enraged him? I will never know.
