I got fired up a couple of months ago and decided to take a trip to the Olympic Peninsula. I didn’t have any real reason to go there except that I had never been through the Northwest corner of the state in which I have spent most of my life, and somehow that seemed like kind of a shame.

It was just about like I expected it to be: Big trees, lots of rain, and a bunch of little towns with shut down sawmills.

I pulled into the town of Forks about two in the afternoon and decided to spend the night there. I could of gone on down to Hoquiam or Aberdeen, but I wasn’t in any big hurry and I’d heard a lot about the town over the years, and wanted to look around a little so I checked into a run down Hindu-Hilton and walked down the street to an old tavern.

The tavern was just a typical workingman’s dive with no pretext of swank or yuppie trendiness that you see in touristy places. There was a scarred wooden floor, a varnished bar, a couple of pool tables, and smoke stained walls covered with pictures of logging in the glory days. A bored barmaid was reading a romance novel, a young couple was swapping spit in a corner booth, and four old guys were screwing around playing partners Stars and Stripes at one of the pool tables. My kind of place. I got a pounder of Rainier-for a buck twenty-five-and walked around looking at the pictures on the wall.

There were a lot of stories going around when I was younger about Forks. It was supposed to be a tough town, and the taverns were reputed to be full of hard-ass loggers that wouldn’t take any shit from anyone and would just as soon fight as drink or screw. That might have been true earlier, when disputes were settled with fists instead of lawyers, or it might still be that way late on a Saturday night, but now the place seemed pretty tame. I wasn’t worried anyway. I learned the secret to survival a long time ago; mind your manners, drink your beer, and keep your mouth shut. Besides, I am fifty-six years old and no threat to anyone any more. Guys my age are smart enough to keep out of fights.

One of the old timers at the pool table finally finished his beer, broke down and cased his custom pool cue, and left to take his wife somewhere. The other three guys shot the shit awhile before one of them called over to ask me if I shot pool. In addition to learning about fighting in strange bars I had also learned about shooting pool with strangers. No matter how good you are or think you are, some local who knows every rut and groove in the table and soft spot on the cushions will invariably take you to the cleaners. “I used to, now and then, but haven’t in quite a while,” I answered truthfully. I had never been very good, and hadn’t played in a couple of years.

“No money.” The guy reassured me. “Just partners and a quarter for the table.”

“Okay,” I finally conceded, and grabbed a stick out of the rack and fished a quarter out of my pocket and placed it on the rail. My partner was Emil, and we played against Stu and Ralph.

“You a logger?” Stu asked, pointing to one of the pictures I had been examining.

“Nope. I built houses in Spokane up until last year, now I’m just fucking around.” That was all the personal history he needed, but I added, “I spent a couple of months in a mill before I went in the service, but we never had trees like these.” Even though I had never worked in the woods I knew how it was done and was familiar with most of the rather arcane terminology of the logging industry.

“There ain’t none of them left here, either,” Emil informed me. “Only thing now are third growth pecker-poles. Takes four dozen just to make a truckload. Damned Forest Circus and the environmentalists have the rest of the old growth locked up tighter than a nun’s cunt.”

Stu racked the balls and broke, sending two of the striped balls into the pockets. He followed up by sinking two more, and then it was Emil’s turn. Emil was a big guy, and seemed oafish and clumsy, but despite his size and bulk he was a very methodical and patient shooter and he was so good that I didn’t even think I’d get a turn, but he finally scratched and turned the table over to Ralph, who missed his first shot. I dumped one more and finally the eight ball, wining us the game.

“Not bad for a guy out of practice,” Stu commented, dropping the quarter into the slot to release the balls for another round. I racked the balls and broke, fucking things up nicely. Ralph followed me, and managed to sink only one, then Emil ran the table. I could have certainly used a partner like him a few years ago when I was playing in the Monday night league.

We shot a couple of more rounds before Emil suddenly checked his watch and announced, “I gotta go, guys. My parole officer will be pissed if I’m late.”

I got a chuckle out of that. Most guys have nicknames for their wives that they use in casual situations, but calling one a parole officer was a new one on me. Emil left and the rest of us migrated to the bar. “Emil doesn’t look like the kind of guy that would let his old lady boss him around,” I commented, after buying us all a round of beer.

“It ain’t his old lady,” Stu explained. “It really is his parole officer.”

“Oh,” I replied, keenly aware that it was none of my business.

“Don’t matter none,” Stu said. “The whole damn town knows all about it, and even if Emil did fuck up he sure as hell paid for it”. Thus primed, and knowing that he had a curious audience, Stu told me the rest of the story.

“Up until five years ago Emil was a gyppo logger,” Stu paused to see if understood what he meant by ‘gyppo logger’. I did. At one time the term may have been used to describe someone at least a little bit unscrupulous, but nowadays there is no disrespect associated with calling someone a gyppo logger; it is just descriptive of a private logging contractor, as opposed to one employed by the timberland or sawmill owner. “He’d been working in the woods all his life, since he was a kid. He was a side rod for Moran and Walter when they folded, so he scraped together enough money to buy some of their equipment and went out on his own. That would have been about twenty years ago.

“The industry was dying even back then, but there was still enough room for a few small guys, and Emil worked his ass off making a go of it. He did okay, too, and was out of debt and owned everything free and clear when it all came down on him.”

“What happened?” I interrupted, knowing I’d probably get the answer eventually anyway.

“He nutted a couple of punks up on Sawyer’s Ridge,” Stu informed me.

“Huh?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

“Well, technically they called it assault of some kind or another, but the fact of the matter was that he castrated two teenage shitheads who richly deserved it, in my opinion, and as a result got sent over to Walla Walla for ten years.”

“Shit!” I commented. “He sure doesn’t look like the type to do something like that.”

“There’s more to the story that that,” Ralph informed me. “Cost you another beer or two to hear it, though.”

I’m not in the habit of buying drinks for strangers, but I just had to hear the rest of the story, so I bought us all another round.

“Like I was saying,” Stu continued, “Emil had it made, then he took a contract for the Forest Circus to log a sale up on Sawyer’s Ridge, must have been sixty or seventy acres. Nothing really special about it, didn’t seem like anyway, just second growth Douglas fir on pretty tame ground.

“What he didn’t know, and what the assholes in the Forest Service didn’t tell him, was that a bunch of hippie squatters were camping out up there, probably growing Wacky Tobaccy, and they sure as hell didn’t want no loggers fucking around in their cash crop. They decided to protest the sale, saying that logging it would fuck up the watershed or some other bunch of bullshit.

“They tried to stop the sale and that didn’t work, so then they tried to block the road with some kind of protest march, and that didn’t work either, Emil just fired up a D-8 Cat and walked it right through them while the forest rangers and sheriff’s deputies stood and watched. About the time those long haired assholes saw sixty tons of steel about to mow them down they scattered like cockroaches.

“The trouble started right away. Even though there was a watchman staying up there in his camp trailer things still got fucked up, somehow. Water showed up in the fuel tanks on the yarder, and that cost them a couple of days, then some cocksucker took an axe to the main line and cut it about a quarter of the way through. They had to shut everything down and get a rigging slinger up to wind on a new cable. That cost a shitload of money and took another few days.

“Winter was closing in, and if they had any more trouble they wouldn’t get done before the contract date was up and things were getting pretty tight, so Emil decided to camp out up on the landing himself so he could maybe scare off whoever was fucking with him.

“He let the watchman go into town and get groceries and whatever one Sunday, and Emil thought he’d seen someone prowling around down at the tail block, so he went down over the side to check it out. Sure enough, someone had slipped in and pulled the lynch pin on the tail block. No big deal, but it would have been a real son-of-a-bitch the first time they tried to haul back. It would have scattered the tail block all over the landscape, maybe even fucked someone up.

“Well, Emil didn’t just haul ass back up the hill, instead he kind of circled around, looking for whoever might have been monkeying around, and when he got back up to the landing he saw these two teenage punks fucking around under the hood of his pickup. Emil had strapped on his .357 before going down the hill, so he calmly drew down on the two little bastards and threatened to blow them away if they tried to run. He held them at gunpoint and tried to get on the radio and call in the law, but the assholes had already fucked up it up to where it wouldn’t work.

“About that time they started in flicking Emil a lot of shit, calling him a Nazi pig and a lot of other things that Emil really didn’t like. Then they tried threatening him, saying that their dad would sneak up on him some night and turn him into a soprano, shit like that. Emil finally got tired of listening to their shit, so he cocked the .357 and let one go about two inches over their heads.

“Now that he had their attention, he made the get face down in the dirt. He tied their hands behind their backs and rolled them over and pulled their pants down. He took a couple pieces of baling wire and hooked their balls up good and tight to each end of the tow strap that he carried in the truck, and then got them both on their feet and told them that they were going to town, and that they could either walk behind his pickup or he would drag them, whichever they preferred.

“He tied the middle of the strap around the hitch ball, got in and started the pickup, and that’s about the time the shit hit the fan.’

“What happened?” I asked.

“What happened was that the fuckers had jimmied up the throttle linkage and as soon as Emil gave it a little bit of gas it stuck wide open and they all took off down the road like a scalded cat. It was all Emil could do to keep from going over the edge of the hill, and by the time he finally figured things out and got it shut down the two kids weren’t on the ends of the strap anymore.”

“Shit!” I said, involuntarily. “Damn, that must have hurt!”

“Yeah, probably, anyway Emil loaded them up in the back of the pickup and hauled them to town to the doctor, didn’t even bother looking for their nuts. He would have been better off just shooting the little fuckers and throwing them over the bank somewhere.

“He got run in on aggravated assault, I think they called it, and got out on Parole after a couple of years, but the kid’s parents sued the shit out of him and he lost damned near everything but his house and his Social Security.”

It was getting pretty late by then, so I finished my beer and walked back to the motel. I was thinking about going back down to the tavern a little later, but instead went and had supper and turned in early. I left town early the next morning. I had seen all of Forks that I cared to see, and I sure as hell didn’t want to risk offending anyone there.

Author’s note. Many of the terms used here are unique to the logging industry. Forks, Washington was, and still is, a tough town. Hint: Don’t go there and refer to them as being lumberjacks. They are loggers, and they are tough.