Stories from the ’70’s.

In my second and third years at UVic I was hired by the Forest Service as part of a huge audit of BC’s provincial timber supply. It paid well and was without a doubt the toughest work I had ever done. I was seventeen and arrived at the work camp behind the Mica Dam near Revelstoke. The dam was nearly finished and the ‘lake’ behind the dam was about to be flooded. Our job would be to survey the topography at 2280’ above sea level. We were told that would be the level the water would rise to and they wanted to salvage commercial timber beneath that level before it was submerged by the flooding.

So let me paint a picture. The work camp we were instructed to arrive at was actually a logging camp. Young Tony arrived in a tiny little Austin 1000 wearing a white shirt and his school tie. I know you can’t imagine that in your mind’s eye so I’m just going to have to ask you to accept it as absolutely true. That I was a naive son, as wet behind the ears a young man as you could find, might give you some context. In any event, I had arrived. It was to be a formative summer, to say the least.

We needed to get up and down the survey area in Forest Service jeeps so each morning we would head out on private logging company roads. Those trips could be harrowing to say the least. The company logging trucks always had the right of way; first of all we were on the company road and secondly a fully loaded logging truck barreling down a mountain logging road has a kind of obvious ‘right of way’. We were two man crews and in that first year I was the junior member. My job as we drove up and down the logging road was to alert oncoming traffic on our position.

“FS8 up at 12.” would let them know that our Forest Service vehicle, number 8, was heading up at Mile 12 (Canada turned to kilometres a few years later).

A logging truck coming down would then say “LT6 down at 15” and both vehicles would then repeat the distance as we moved closer and closer. At some point the Forest Service vehicle had to pull over and let the logging truck by. It was always exciting and depending on your driver that day sometimes very exciting; it wasn’t uncommon to find a pull out on the narrow logging roads with just a few metres to spare, the logging truck roaring by leaving us in a huge cloud of dust in its wake. I’m pretty sure the veteran Forest Service drivers got a kick out of scaring the rookies.

I was the butt of an ongoing joke that first summer.

“FS8 up at Mile 15.” I said in my most confident voice. When a logging truck driver finally responded he was howling with laughter, asking in a high pitched mocking voice, “FS8, say again.”

“FS8 up at Mile 16.” More laughter over the radio, joined by another logging truck driver and then another, all of them mocking my young sounding voice. I mean these men had whiskers on their vocal chords.

They found my young sounding, soft voice very, very funny and thus began a summer long running gag, notwithstanding my self conscious efforts to find anything akin to a lower octave. Gotta give it to them, it was pretty funny. Well at least it was in the very ‘manly’ world of logging and logging truck drivers. I had no choice but to grin and bear it.

It was one of the most extraordinary summers I have ever spent, experiencing the outdoors in a way I had never been exposed to before. Each day was hard work, surveying the length of the Columbia River valley above the dam placing pink ribbon on trees at 2280’ as instructed. I rode in flat bottomed river jet boats upstream during the spring run off, I watched spell bound as a female moose protected its calf from marauding wolves and I came way too close to a female Grizzly bear and her yearling cub.

We were surveying a gully of thick alder down near the river. My partner had hiked through the alder across the gully so I could take a survey ‘shot’ with the altimeter. As he shouted back above the roar of the raging river I could see vague dark shapes about 100m from him. To my horror I suddenly realized they were a Grizzly bear and her cub, on their haunches, nose in the air, trying to find out the source of the scent they had picked up. Our scent. I radio’d my partner and told him as calmly as I could that he had to come back over “NOW!”. It took him at least eight minutes to make his way back, all the while the Grizzly bears snorting into the wind, searching for something that must have smelt delicious to them.

As my partner arrived back, scared and dripping with sweat they finally picked up our scent. We took off and could hear the bears crashing through the thick alder in our direction. Grizzly’s don’t wind their way carefully through alder thickets, they steam roll it, crashing and grunting making sounds that meant nothing but trouble for us.

We were terrified and with good reason. We couldn’t see them but they were close and closing in, they would have been about a hundred and fifty metres away at that point. I’m here to tell the story so you know the ending. We went downwind along the bank of the Columbia and eventually circled back to our jeep now armed with a great story for dinner.

We were a big crew and finished the survey by midsummer, given a great party by our boss, thankful for work we had done. We were set to be reassigned for some work on the coast when word came from Victoria. It must have gone something like this:

‘Yeah, uh hi there, it’s Frank from HQ in Victoria. Look, we may have made a small miscalculation on this thing. The lake is actually only going to reach 2240’ when we flood behind the Mica Dam so we’ll be needing you to survey the entire area again. Could you send your boys back in

Of course that’s my imagined voice but it was a boneheaded mistake. Must have cost them hundreds of thousands to fix. But back in we went, all of us hell bent on completing the survey at 2240’ by the time we broke for school. And we did.

By the end of my next summer I had worked on the Coast range climbing steep mountains on Howe Sound to do timber surveys. We would be helicoptered high up on the mountains so we could set up our base camp and work from there for up to ten days.

By now I was the senior team member so made most of the decisions about campsite and location. Our first order of business would be to set our long copper radio antenna as high up a tree as we could and then find a safe place for our supply of food, usually pulled high up a tree in heavy canvas cases. We could see Howe Sound, thousands of feet below but we were as isolated as I have ever been and on our own, no matter what.

And of course ‘what’ happened. On one particular camp it rained from the moment we were dropped off to the moment we were picked up ten days later. I have never been that wet again in my entire life and we were predictably miserable, hiking off into the rain clouds each day following that day’s compass reading to that day’s survey site. I had the compass and my junior had to pull a metal cord called a ‘chain’ up the mountain ahead of me on my reading, crossing over whatever obstacle was in the path. It would take several hours to get to each site, about an hour to do the survey and several hours to return to camp. I’m sure you can imagine our state of mind. On one of those days upon our return we found our camp completely disturbed and the worst of it, our food bags had been pulled down and torn apart by bears. We had pounds of butter in cans but they had been punctured through with their teeth and they’d sucked out the delicious contents. We had been taught to make as much noise as we could hiking in the woods and I think that must have disturbed the creatures because we had enough left to manage the remaining six days of this camp. But I was unnerved and my junior was scared to death.

I tried to assure him that it was a one off and they wouldn’t be back, knowing full well that they would of course be back. I was reading ‘Thirteen Flags’ at the time, a novel about a Russian wolf hunter who had protected his campsites with red ribbons which he would tie all around the camp. Well, if there was one thing I had, it was red ribbon, a whole case of it. That is what we were using to mark the trees we surveyed. So that afternoon before bed, we encircled our campsite with red ribbon and to make doubly certain we would be alerted to any intrusion, I hung metal pots and pans from the tape. We were good.

Actually we were good until we weren’t good. It rained again that night and we crawled into our sleeping bags and fell asleep. Sometime in the wee hours our early warning pans system jolted us awake. Now you need to see the picture. Two young men, bolt upright in a two man pup tent, rain teeming down, pots clanging, the unmistakable grunting of a bear and the even more unmistakable pounding of our hearts. I had never seen a man’s eyes that big before. My poor junior was beside himself but let’s get real here, so was I.

Some teams carried weapons for just this situation but I had always refused to, although I did have a phosphorus gun, a non lethal weapon which I had always thought would scare off any animals, in a pinch. It was shaped like a small long flashlight and you had to load a phosphorus bullet into it by screwing in the round. You try doing that in pitch black, rain teeming down, your heart racing and a bear grunting within feet of you.

Oh and I was naked on account of nothing was dry enough to wear to bed. Now you have the full picture. This is what they would call ‘being in a pinch”.

“Okay, okay, I’m going to fire this phosphorus gun at him. So I need you to unzip the flap and I’ll run out.”. I was hell bent on taking control of the situation, not having a clue on how to do that.

What the hell was I thinking? I gathered myself, got into the launch position, signalled my junior and ran out of the tent into the darkness, as naked as the day I was born, apparently ready to meet my fate and I tripped on the material riser at the entrance to our tent. I flew through the air and landed with a thud. I was wide eyed I’m sure, my eyes as big as saucers, searching for some shape in the darkness, shadows dancing from our flashlights on the trees.

BANG! I fired the gun and a phosphorus bullet put on an incredible display, the bright purple ricocheting off tree trunks like some sort of pinball light show. I caught a glimpse of the bear on his haunches, no doubt wondering, ‘What the hell is this manner of naked nonsense’ or some such thing. Whatever the beast actually thought, he decided this was all a little weird for his liking and took off into the deep forest.

And I thanked the God that I didn’t actually believe existed. We were plucked off that mountain a few days later and returned to our base camp with yet another great story for the dinner table.

Later that same summer our crew was sent up to Fort Nelson in the northeast of BC, to do some survey work. To survey what, I’ll never understand. That inhospitable part of the country was only good for sixty year old 20’ Black Spruce, and mosquitoes and horse flies big enough to pick a man up and cart him off for dinner. And it was good for oil and gas which is of course why we were really there. If there is a hell on earth, this part of our province is a candidate.

Late in the summer we had been dropped for yet another ten day camp. As usual the first order of business was to set up communication, food security and the latrine, downwind and some distance away, for obvious reasons. Trouble with that part of the province is that it is mostly muskeg. There is no digging a latrine in the conventional sense so we had to make do with what we could find. We dropped a couple of Black Spruce, stripped off the bark and fashioned a seat, all the better to provide basic comfort during our ablutions. My father, the soldier, would have been proud of me.

So inevitably I found myself at our latrine, sitting on the seat we had made. In my hands “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” a novel by Joanne Greenberg about a sixteen year old schizophrenic, a story of adjustment in an upside down world. I had found mine. And I had to wait some minutes, unable to conjure up my offerings on demand in that setting. It was a long few minutes.

Now sitting still for anything in that part of our country is a problem at the best of times. The mosquitoes and horse flies are relentless and insatiable and huge! Of course I had my mosquito netting covering my entire body, although it seems abundantly clear in the telling that at least some parts of my body would have to be exposed, given the nature of the business at hand. And of course, clever little beasts such as they are, mosquitoes and horse flies found my exposed parts. I felt a weight alighting on the tip of my (with apologies I go forward, it is simply an essential part of the narrative), on the tip of my penis. Now when it comes to one’s penis as most men will attest, much of our reaction to it is uncomplicated and instinctive. And this moment would prove to be no exception. Without thinking, I used my free hand to SMACK! the offending horsefly before it had a chance to feast on the head of my cowering member.

That concussive action was followed by a loud shriek of the sort that signals some sort of pain. I had missed the horsefly and hit my ‘self’ as hard as I could. It was excruciating.

It did not go unnoticed that we did not have to protect our food supply from marauding bears. They had long since come to understand that the northeast of BC is not fit for man nor beast and had moved south and west. 

We were picked up from that particular ten day camp by helicopter. The hot summer air was so ‘thin’ that the pipe smoking former RAF pilot kept on ordering us to throw baggage out, to lighten the helicopter. Back and forth we went over a cleared and abandoned oil derrick site, the choppers forward antenna coming within inches of the ground, the blades above us unable to grab the air and lift the aircraft off the ground.

“More!” he ordered through his clenched British teeth, “Dump more!” and try again he would. In the end we left all our baggage and survey equipment on the ground in that remote and abandoned  part of BC, never to be recovered.

But we did return with our most important baggage, a summer bounty of stories that would last a lifetime and a yarn or two I could spin when the occasion arose.