Forest Life and Forest Trees: comprising winter camp-life among the loggers, and wild-wood adventure.: with Descriptions of lumbering operations on the various; rivers of Maine and New BrunswickSpringer, John S.
History
Forest Life and Forest Trees: comprising winter camp-life among the loggers, and wild-wood adventure.: with Descriptions of lumbering operations on the various; rivers of Maine and New Brunswick
Springer, John S.
Lumbering -- Maine; Maine -- Description and travel; New Brunswick -- Description and travel; Trees
We have here no "turnpikes" nor rail-ways, but what is often more
interesting. No pencilings can excel the graceful curves found in a
main road as it winds along through the forest, uniform in width of
track, hard-beaten and glassy in its surface, polished by the sled and
logs which are so frequently drawn over it. Each fall of snow, when
well trodden, not unlike repeated coats of paint on a rough surface,
serves to cover up the unevenness of the bottom, which in time becomes
very smooth and even. And besides, no street in all our cities is so
beautifully studded with trees, whose spreading branches
affectionately interlace, forming graceful archways above. Along this
road side, on the way to the landing, runs a serpentine pathway for
the "knight of the goad," whose deviations are marked now outside this
tree, then behind that "windfall," now again intercepting the main
road, skipping along like a dog at one's side. To pass along this road
in mid-winter, one would hardly suspect the deformities which the
dissolving snows reveal in the spring--the stumps and knolls, skids
and roots, with a full share of mud-sloughs, impassable to all except
man, or animals untrammeled with the harness.
In the process of making these roads, the first thing in order is to
look out the best location for them. This is done by an experienced
hand, who "spots" the trees where he wishes the road to be "swamped."
We usually begin at the landing, and cut back toward the principal
part of the timber to be hauled.
In constructing this road, first all the underbrush is cut and thrown
on one side; all trees standing in its range are cut close to the
ground, and the trunks of prostrated trees cut off and thrown out,
leaving a space from ten to twelve feet wide. The tops of the highest
knolls are scraped off, and small poles, called skids, are laid across
the road in the hollows between. Where a brook or slough occurs, a
pole-bridge is thrown across it.
These preparatory arrangements are entered upon and prosecuted with a
degree of interest and pleasure by lumbermen scarcely credible to
those unacquainted with such a mode of life and with such business.
Though not altogether unacquainted with other occupations and other
sources of enjoyment, still, to such scenes my thoughts run back for
the happier portions of life and experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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