When I was a kid and into the fifties, when the family drove around the gloomy Oregon countryside, the most cheerful sight in the night was an orange tin cone, throwing out sparks in the darkness. Whether it was black and rainy, windy or otherwise, the smell of wood smoke lingered in the air and there was a cheerful fire out there burning in the damp landscape. Down by Roseburg, Grants Pass, up toward Eugene, at the Oregon coast as the gray breakers pounded the sand, these homemade volcanoes—-like a woodstove made out of an oil drum— brightened up dark winter and wet spring. Their shape looked kind of like a teepee, or a wigwam, to the local folks or loggers, I guess that's how they got their name-—“wigwam” burners. They served a practical purpose, then. This was before the manufacture of wood chips, and the use of sawdust, and the myriad of new products the chemists in the wood industry now make. Slash is the torn and shredded limbs and chunks of bark of logging debris. You burned that stuff up and got rid of it. It was waste and just got in the way. Pretty soon, you'd be tripping over it, unable to operate the mill. Now it’s nearly 1980. And the Department of Environmental Quality says smoke causes pollution and you have to have a permit to fire up the old tin Lizzie. At the edge of Vernonia, there is a shingle mill, called Cedarwood Timber Co. And right in broad daylight, at the end of a stormy August. we saw this relic of a bygone era being used. A guy was stoking it with wood scraps, the flames crackling in the square door. My teeth nearly fell out of my mouth with delight, rediscovering the past! Eric and I leaped out of the car and began snapping pictures for posterity. Eddie Miller, the owner, must be operating the last wigwam burner in Oregon. His cedar shingle and shake mill needs the burner to get rid of the refuse. It all can’t be carted away for use in the family woodstove. Eddie said, “The DEQ allows up to 20 per cent of distortion by smoke above the burner. This means if you can see the trees, you’re operating within the limits. I am.” He goes and shows us the blower, which works like a bellows, introducing air through a grate, in the concrete floor of the burner. It works like a charm. Eddie is a philosophical man. A wizard, a jack-of-all-trades, the one who keeps the shingle mill going. At 65, with a twinkle in his eyes, a soft quilted cap on his head, he cracks jokes, and tells us, “Sure. Go ahead and look around. You can’t carry away anything of value.” Meaning chunks of red cedar. He's about ready to retire. And besides, the Vernonia city limits have crept right up to the shingle mill. New zoning and sewers and the surveying of streets march in. Eddie is going to close the mill next year, and subdivide the property for housing. Hearing this, my heart feels a deep pang of sorrow. A true artifact of the Pacific Northwest woods, and an old- fashioned way of earning a living, will disappear forever. Only a block of wood would fail to feel emotion! Have you ever smelled the fragrance of Western red cedar? There's nothing like it. That perfume is the nearest thing to heaven. Cedar makes great kindling to start a fire. When the sharp hatchet hits it, it makes a pinging sound. Cedar splits narrow and thin, clean and long-grained. The mill itself is a work of art, mellowed by time and use, yet bearing the stamp of a perfect practical design. It only takes one or two men to operate it. The boards are weathered, grayish, with a rusty tin roof. Two-level. A log pond out back, covered with green scum, an ecological paradise full of bullfrogs and crappie and trout. Snakes sunning themselves, a dragonfly hovering like a biological helicopter. Eric and I examined it from every angle. Eddie allowed us to roam at The Last Wigwam Burner By Walt Curtis will, when he drove into town. This is the way it works: The red cedar logs are brought by truck to the pond. A tripod of logs, with tongs and cable, hitched to a diesel engine, a “donkey,” unloads the logs. They are rolled into the pond, where they float until needed. Then a guy with a pea- vee poles a log to a chute, ready to enter the mill. Up the chute the log is pulled by cable. Then a chunk of it, say 18 inches, is sawed off. With hammer and wedge, this round chunk is split into pyramid-shaped blocks. Remember we’re on the second floor. A guy who runs a saw is called the “sawyer.” It takes some skill not to waste wood. To get it the right length and operate the machinery. And not cut off your hand. There are several kinds of saws up here, and rollers and conveyor chains. And lots of sawdust. Wood smells. Light coming in through the windows. And shiny blades. Whose teeth need to be sharpened. A breeze will kick up the fine sawdust. And 1 thought 1 saw the sunbeams buzzsaw their way through the shadows and illuminate the saw blades, replicating their operation. What's the difference between a shake and a shingle? Well, shakes are thick slabs of roofing cedar, about three-fourths of an inch thick. The best ones are supposed to be hand split. Cedarwood Timber Co. puts a blue-and-white tag on its bundles, reading: CERTI-SPLIT Number I Grade Handsplit Red Cedar Shakes. These shakes meet all quality requirements. 24" x 1/2” x 5 /8” Tapersplit. There was a 75-year-old man, by a shed, splitting shakes by hand with a mallet and a shingle knife. He rotated the log to get the correct taper. Good solid work, honest as the day is long. Up in the mill, there was a slightly ripple-bladed forge-like machine which could approximate hand-split shakes. It pounded upward and split uniform shakes with a rippled side. Sawn on both sides, shingles are thin. Aren't they used on the side of the house? They are so thin they wouldn't last long, deteriorating in the years of rainy, soggy weather. These shingles, sawn by a round saw, dropped down chutes, where they were sorted by grade and bundled. On the first floor. Eddie did this. Stacking them appropriately, and tacking a metal band around them. The “bundle" was ready to sell. Eddie reminisces: “I started work in the mill in 1945. I bought it in '49, At that time, shakes were worth six and a quarter dollars a bundle. The next year the price jumped to $14. I thought I was going to be a millionaire!” It’s plain to see. as you watch Eddie at work, that he is the brains and master of this mill. He's put his whole life into it. And he can do every job. He can almost run the mill single-handedly. He does his own repairs, in a toolshed out back. He continues about the economics: "Then logs cost me $32.50 a thousand board feet. Now I sell the squares (four bundles) for $60, but the price of the log is $300 a thousand.” He jokes about it. It’s obvious he hasn’t become a millionaire. The cost of the logs has increased about ten times, as has the price for his shakes, in 30 years. He’s just about broke even. Though obviously the land the mill is on is worth money when he subdivides. As Eric and I explored the mill, the human dimension to the place was what got you. Four or five tittle kids, of one of the workers named Francis, and a yellow pup named Daisy, followed us around. They observed us curiously, as we observed them and the mill. School hadn’t started yet. They were bare-chested and barefoot. Not worried about splinters or tickling sawdust. They clambered on conveyors, tiptoeing on bark and logs, pointing out sights for us to see. A pumphouse. The white hose, flopping about like a boa constrictor in the green scum of the pond, helped maintain its water level. The kids walked in the hot ashes of the wigwam. They told us giant snakes lived just beyond it. And we saw a fat gray snake, about an inch thick. The color of ashes. Do the snakes stay around the burner, enjoying its warmth in winter? Francis, his wife, and his brood of kids live in a cedar-shingled cabin behind the mill. He is heavy-set. dignified, with a full brown face. Eddie said he was a Pima Indian. 1 believe 1 heard him correctly. He is Eddie’s main helper. They start work at seven in the morning and quit at two in the afternoon. A fairly easygoing day. What will happen to Francis and his family when the mill shuts down? Can he get another fairly unskilled job like this? Maybe, maybe not. Francis and a blond kid. a teenager, were throwing scrap wood out the second-floor window into a pickup. The kid had a bothered but hard-working look on his face. The little kids made no bones about mentioning he was “adopted.” It is a marginal way of life, yet healthy in its closeness to wood and pond, work activity and open weather. A little hard work never hurt anybody. I asked Francis, “Why are some of the chunks of wood burned at the edges?” He answered. "It doesn't hurt the cedar. In fact, it seals and protects the inner wood." Most of the logs are harvested by helicopter. Way back in the woods, from old forest fires. They put a choker cable on the log, and haul it straight into the sky. To Eddie I comment about the kids running over the machinery, exploring every nook and cranny. "They know better when the mill is in operation. These manx cats kill the rats around here,” Eddie continues. “When I quit the mill. I’ll have plenty of bulldozer work to do on the subdivision. I know better than to quit and not do anything. That's the surest way into the ground.” Eddie has a boat at the coast. He goes salmon fishing and crosses the Columbia River bar in it. He looks forward to that. Pointing to a wild young black manx. Eddie says, “ If you can catch it. take it home with you. Otherwise, that cat will go to the chopping block.” The twinkle continues in his eye, as he says it. Poor little critter. Its tail already looks like it’s been cut off! As Eric and I look around us. we realize the mill has to be recorded. Eddie Miller doesn’t mind. “Sure. It’s okay.” Secretly he must feel flattered that everybody is coming out here interested in his lowly shingle mill. He mentions. "A painter came out here with some students, and painted a’ picture. Later on, I learned he sold the painting for $2,000. I never got any of it.” We have told him that Eric, the earner iman, is scouting locations to make a local movie, called Paydirt. “Could we shoot scenes here at the mill. Eddie? Would it be okay if I work in the mill during the filming?” “Sure, it’s fine by me." A very philosophical man. Eddie Miller knows it. The bullfrogs. the snakes, the kids, the cabin out back, the pond with green scum on it shining in the afternoon light, the timbers of the old mill, the saws, the smell of it, the work of it, the flopping hose, the beacon—the wigwam burner itself—with conveyor leading out of the mill to dump scrap into the orange crackling flames. Blockhead, I know it. I lost a middle finger in a sawmill, not unlike this. 20 years ago. The cedar shingles and shakes which hold out the patter and the watery slaughter of the rain on the roofs of Vernonia, and western Oregon, and the world sense it. Before it goes up in smoke. Before it goes down the drain. The history of the place wishes to be recorded on celluloid, which is just like cellulose. A wood by-product. Art. Who is the real art isI? The guy who runs and repairs the mill? Or the artist who puts it on canvas? You know who. and so do I. The real one is going into retirement soon, and with him his masterpiece will vanish. Only the image of a fiery tin-metal cone recedes in the night of history. As the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay said. "Beller to light one candle than curse the darkness." Eddie Miller kept a wigwam burner glowing for 35 years. God bless him! The last of the wigwams, the hearth fire and beacon light of loggers and mill men in big limber country, fades into memory. Photo by Eric Edwards 19
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz