gyppo john
Gyppo John dropped by today with a block of old growth straight grain fir he’d whacked off a tree he’d felled just north of here. You see a few old timers left on the bluffs where the loggers of old couldn’t get them down easily. Gyppo John’s got the know-how, the tools, some equipment and enough cronies to get it down without losing the whole thing down the hill, then sectioning it into 25 foot lengths some 5 feet in diameter, loading it up on a lowboy trailer and dragging it down to a muddy side road south of the Diner while he figures out how to sell it.
It’s been dead on the stump long enough to be completely dried. It’s vertical grain, tight ringed and beautiful, what goes for $10 a board foot at any good lumber yard. A board foot, for you city slickers, is the Width x Length x Thickness. Probably not on the WASL test these days. Unless you go to high school in Darrington. A plank 1 inch by 4 inch thick would only need to be 3 feet long to make one board foot if my 6th grade math serves me…. An eight foot 2×4 would be worth a little less than $60. Gyppo John had 5000 board feet on the hoof and he was trying to figure out who would pay him the most. He’d tried the mills. He’d called the specialty hardwood places. He’d talked to some luthiers and he’d been sniffing around some cabinetmaker shops. John need the cash and he needed it fast, but he sure didn’t want to give this tree away for someone Else to make the profit.
Such is life on the gentrified South End. The days of Les Benz’s sawmill down the road are long gone. Me and my neighbor Pete put poor old Les in the morgue one night, toe tagged and cold storage, when we two orderlies at Everett General Hospital delivered him to the fridge. His mill is Pete’s now, but the old Chevy 350 h.p. engine and the rusty 3 foot diameter blade scared us boys too much to fire it up for a nostalgic run at pre-OSHA sawmilling. Naw, those scrappy days are long gone. Thankfully for those of us who hold dear to things like fingers and limbs…. But the infrastructure to help Gyppo John is gone too, unfortunately.
Still, it warms my heart a little to think of John, gimping now at 50, straddling a chainsaw with a 4 foot blade, almost a ghost sliding into our digital present, winching up a dinosaur for the gawking crowd who never saw the real thing in the wild. Yah, you betcha, I went down and took a picture of the beast myself, strapped and secured on the trailer, dead as Kong. John isn’t far behind and most of us won’t know, not really, what we lost.
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