Tall Tales
Some folks think these stories are mostly made up, that the wild wild South End disappeared long ago, domesticized under the yoke of cable TV and social networking. They think we all conformed, threw up the white flag of surrender to county government and the gated communities. Oh, a few packed it up and migrated to less populated places where the taxes are cheaper and the neighbors farther away. But the South End, for all its latter-day gentrification, still howls late at night, still barks at strangers. And I don’t just mean me….
Gyppo Paul stopped by this spring. Paul’s what you’d call an outlaw. Pretty much ignores societal rules and fairly regularly breaks the law. I’m not saying he’s a role model, I’m just saying he lives here on his own terms. When Paul drops by, I figure trouble’s coming in the door too, semi-invited. What he wants, when he finally gets to it, is he needs to unload some old growth logs he’s managed to cut off the stump, haul out and section into 27 and 21 foot lengths, winch onto a trailer and move into a side road where the trailer tires are squashed deep into the mud.
He needs money and he’s willing to let these go cheap. In my younger days I lived in a ghetto. You want to see unbridled capitalism, go down to the Mean Streets. Paul would prosper there. Commerce, barter, theft; everything’s fungible. Everything! I figure Paul poached the tree. Dead old growth. Absentee landowner. Who’d care? I said go talk to Pete, I’m not set up for this action.
Story short: Pete buys the tree. He’s got a place that once was the Benz sawmill. His house was built by Benz and built out of lumber milled on a 4 foot sawblade powered off a chain driven by a 350 horsepower Chevy engine. My shack has cedar lumber milled there too, same blade marks. Most of me and my neighbors don’t have a way to deal with a 27 foot long, 4 foot diameter log, much less two of them, that weigh about the tonnage of two or three of their travel trailers. Those logging days are long gone — or so they think.
But I’m talking about the South End and Pete’s a certified — or certifiable — South Ender. He builds boats, kayaks, cider mills, furniture, you name it, the man isn’t intimidated by any lack of experience. What he needs to learn, he learns. He didn’t come here to retire, that’s for sure. By summer he’s got a portable mill rigged up, a two man operation with 2 chain saws driving a 4 foot bar with a chain that rides on top of the log and slabs off 27 foot lengths two inches thick. It takes him two weeks to whittle down a fir 470 years old.
Scoff if you like at the mythology of the South End, but trust me when I tell you: this is the last old growth that’s gonna be milled on the island, logged by a gyppos after the pioneers first arrived. You think the South End is nothing but Tall Tales, well …. you’d be mostly right.
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