Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

  Them oolicans was done, but they had that shark,

  And Carter sez, “Boys, we’re out of luck,

  For that there cook puts up poor truck.”

  (Chorus.)

  III

  His steamboat was anchored right out in the bay;

  A storm came up and she sank in the spray,

  But Carter sez, “Don’t YOU worry at all,

  For I paid seventeen for her just last fall.”

  (Chorus.)

  IV

  Pretty soon they had got all the logs off the claim,

  And they went down the Inlet as poor as they came,

  But Carter sez, “Boys, you’ll now see a sight;

  I’ll put on the mitts and the bears I’ll fight.”

  (Chorus.)

  Perhaps the song means little to you.

  That evening we four men of an audience applauded wildly; slapping Kendall on the back, trying to get him to remember more verses. For the song was full of the most deadly innuendo. It would be impossible to give you a just idea of the subtlety of the allusions, but I may try to explain one or two points.

  “A group busy splicing line”: Carter would ruffle at this, for such emphasis on the fact that the line had broken was a covert sneer at the man whose business it was to haul out logs without breaking the line – the hook tender. And Carter, in the song, was tending hook.

  “The donkey throwing fog,” calls up to any logger the picture of an old rattle-trap of a donkey-engine from every decayed point of which clouds of steam are squirting.

  “Them oolicans was done.” Oolicans are, like smelts, very good eating, in my opinion. But the fact that Carter had laid in a large stock of them, barrelled in brine, bought for a small sum from the Indians, gave the singer a chance to insinuate that Carter’s cook-house was run upon the cheap. A boss logger is very touchy about the reputation of his cook-house.

  As for the mud shark, it had trapped itself under some boom logs when the tide ran out. We had taken its liver to make oil.

  On Coola Inlet.

  Throwing the blame of poor meals upon the cook is an old wheeze of the mean boss. You will perceive, therefore, in the second verse, another dig at Carter.

  In the last verse there is a slur that would hurt Carter. It is in the assumption that he had not been logger enough to make money up the Inlet.

  The sting of the whole song, however, is in the last two lines, that are calculated, with deadly accuracy, to hurt Carter in his tenderest vanity. At a certain early stage of drink Carter will often tell a yarn about a fight he once had with a bear when out hunting on the mountains in Cariboo. It is a good, interesting yarn, and it shows signs of embellishment from time to time, for Carter enjoys telling it hugely. But in a hostile world it affords material for bitter jibes behind Carter’s back – and is held an unblushing lie.

  It was on the afternoon of the next day that I saw Carter for the last time. Mike Kendall and Bob Doherty had gone out hunting in the snow, and when we heard their signal shots from the mountain-side beyond Carter’s camp we launched a boat to fetch them and their meat home by water.

  So it happened that first the three of us, and soon after (upon the return journey) the five of us, glided slowly in our rowboat past the whole line of Carter’s camp and rafts and place of working. The afternoon was calm and still.

  Upon a great raft, left high upon the beach, stood the old donkey-engine squirting its many puffs of steam. Just within the fringe of the seashore woods we saw a figure toiling in the snow. It was François. And, now running to and fro between François and the engine; now bending over the machinery to tighten nuts with hasty spanner; now jerking over levers to start the throbbing pistons, hauling upon a log that would not move – was a black figure of activity. Carter.

  He saw us, of course; saw Kendall and me and the Dohertys and the well-known humorist M‘Curdy. He saw the two deer that Kendall had so carefully exposed to view.1 He saw our silent passing by “upon the other side.” But Carter, so close to us that we could see the very grease marks on his clothes, seemed rapt in work unconscious that we existed. And François (who knew us all) did not dare to cast a look at us from where he worked nigh to the beach.

  And that ends my story.

  Farewell, then, to wrenching and tearing and intensity of effort; to great fatigues and physical discomforts; to sweaty work with simple tools; to trails in far-away mountain places; to rest and warmth beside log-fires in the woods!

  Farewell to loggers and my youth!

  Farewell to it all: marriage is better.

  And now I must go and scrub the kitchen floor of

  The cottage next to Mrs. Potts’,

  in (what will be) Lyall Avenue,

  (outside the city limits of)

  VICTORIA,

  B.C.

  July 1908.

  1. Not to share deer meat with a neighbour is a marked discourtesy.

  AFTERWORD

  BY CAROLINE ADDERSON

  As you walk down Cordova Street in the city of Vancouver, you notice a gradual change in the appearance of the shop windows. The funky designer clothing stores, “antique” stores, cafés, retro-consignment stores cease to bother you with their blinding hipness. You see fewer goods fit for young urban professionals with attitude; you leave “cool” behind you.

  You come to Woodward’s, walls scrawled with jagged graffiti cipher, the store abandoned now these last years. Beyond Abbott Street, the Army and Navy announces a “Shoe Spectacular,” and through the dirty windows you see bins of plastic pumps, brown, size eleven. Walk on past the welfare hotels: Cordova Rooms, the Columbia, the Wonder Hotel. Farther along, a beverage-container recycling program operates out of a storefront, saving bottle-pickers the indignity of supermarket limits on returns. Across the street is the Salvation Army Detox Centre.

  On the sidewalk, there is a change in the people, too. You see few women. Men stare down in the gutter; men drift up and down the street; men stand in listless pairs upon the curb. Your eye is struck at once by the unusual proportion of the men staggering in the crowd, men muttering to themselves in two or more voices, men in wheelchairs, men who look hopeless in their slept-in clothes.

  Now go back to the car and drive to the east end of Cordova Street, then take the Second Narrows Bridge to the North Shore. Follow the Mountain Highway and soon you come to a forest, a place where green has a spectrum all its own, far, it seems, from urban seediness and grime, though in actuality just thirty minutes from downtown. Once you are out of the car and walking a path spongy from centuries of shed needles and bark, you can forget the accelerating dissolution of the city. Before you is a massive cedar stump, fifteen feet around, four or five hundred years old. It was hand-logged; you can tell by the notches cut to hold the springboards on which the loggers balanced as they swung their double-bitted axes or pushed and pulled the long cross-cut saw. Douglas fir grows to two hundred feet, cedar to one hundred and fifty. What kind of men toppled trees that size, and fifteen or twenty per day?

  “Virile-looking” men, Grainger writes, “firm of flesh and weather-stained,” and each with such a multiplicity of occupations that, if asked his business suddenly, a man like Tennessee “would hesitate whether to say telegraph operator or carpenter” – or faller or swamper or steam captain or steam engineer. They were masters of “the Western art of makeshift – the art of rough-and-ready and never-at-a-loss … improvising the ‘good-enough’ that proves to be good enough.” They were men who worked. “Not if the weather suits, or if circumstances are favourable, or if one’s calculations were correct, or unless one should be too tired….” They worked with ancient, ill-functioning equipment like Carter’s donkey-engine, as cantankerous as Carter, capable of taking “a man’s leg clean off.” When they were not working, they might be found in hotel saloons uncomplaining while untreated wounds oozed, or rowing out in the black of night to the sanctuary of an anchored steamer where they might wait out the whisky horrors because they drank
like they worked. The braved treacherous waters alone in leaking boats, and some, like Dan Macdonnell, simply disappeared. A hundred years ago they frequented the Cordova Street saloons between jobs. Look at Cordova Street today.

  The contrast suggests that over the last hundred or so years, our culture has been in physical and moral decline – that, or these broad characters, amazing feats, and appalling conditions are simply the elements in a tall tale. But if Woodsmen of the West seems in places hyperbolic, it is, I think, because of the kind of writer M. Allerdale Grainger was – a “non-professional” trying to earn with a pen his passage from England back to Canada – and the kind of book it is: one of those unabashed hybrids wherein the narrator and the writer share a name. Not because of its tall-tale feel would I call it fiction. Rather, that feel is the consequence of what transforms the autobiography. For it is not the brawny characters and all that they achieve and endure that tests our credulity, but the fact that the narrator so doggedly insists that he himself is not one. M. Allerdale Grainger, the writer, has employed a fictional device – the setting up of his character Martin as a foil for every woodsman – and in doing so has written himself a novel.

  M. Allerdale Grainger was the proverbial sickly only child, a son who never reached the stature of his burly, athletic father, a short man (I see him as short, but maybe that is because in the picture we have of him he is standing next to a tree) set all his life on proving himself physically – in the Boer War, the Klondike (he failed to reach it), and the Western woods. That he won a scholarship to Cambridge where he studied mathematics seems not to have mattered. It is as if he is admiring his father in all the men he writes about, even the loathsome Carter, and, naturally, he casts himself as the pensive, limping misadventurer. And this is why I loved the book: because they were there, too – the teetotalers, the listeners, the letter-writers, the little men who suddenly realized everyone was eyeing them askance because they had neglected to remove their collars. We rarely hear their stories because they were completely overshadowed by burl and brawn – that, or they were too embarrassed to tell them.

  “Some of us were obviously not loggers,” Martin says of his passengers on the Cassiar at the beginning of the novel. His sense of physical inferiority exacerbated by an injured foot, when he is actually hired – something he was not at all confident of – he finds himself “on Carter’s boom, a figure of hopeless incompetence.” He complains of soft hands and muscles weak from disuse, at the same time extolling the virtues of hard labour – “the perpetual pleasure in small achievements,” “the great pleasure of working up the intensity of effort,” the athletic and artistic pleasure in trying to develop effortless accuracy in the swinging of an axe.” He claims physical work is “a call upon one’s reasoning powers, too, and upon one’s goodwill.” This is work, he says, that “makes a difference,” though the work he himself is doing – chopping wood, boring broomsticks, cooking, and accounting – can hardly be counted in what he deems the noble struggle against Nature. Although we never hear Carter say it, clearly Martin is not his best man. His duties reassigned, he is made captain of the Sonora, but mishaps ensue. On his maiden voyage he grounds the boat (he is writing a letter). He collides with the very vessel he has been hired to tow. Later, trying to show up another man as he navigates a narrow channel, he breaks the steering gear.

  “My opinion of myself hurt me,” he writes.

  What Martin seems to excel at most is comic relief. And something else. You see few women, he notes of Cordova Street and, by extension, of the logging camps. Apart from the brief mention of Mrs. Jones at the Hanson Island Hotel, the feminine pronoun is used in Woodsmen of the West exclusively for steamboats, even when a steamboat is named Burt. A certain “ma” appears, steering the Gipsy, but later turns out to be a man; he is nicknamed “ma” because he also cooks! But I have a theory about Martin and the role men like him played in ultramasculine locales such as logging-camps: that in the absence of women, someone will take their place.

  All through the book Martin laments his softness, his shyness, his self-consciousness, his “nerves.” He blushes over his axe-work. Among the powerful and spiked-booted, his self-effacing charm and gentleness seem positively womanly. At the Hanson Island Hotel, unnerved by the realization that he is inappropriately dressed (in a collar!), he flees to the kitchen. Ironically, his accomplishments are equal in diversity to those he so admires in other men, though different in kind. We see him as a nurse to Al’s infected eye, Fitz’s festering leg, and the whole of Carter’s crew, passing around bromide when they arrive drunk to camp. Men confide in him, men who “proved to be desperately anxious to talk,” which makes me think how today we would call Martin “sensitive” and consider not only him a superior man for the trait, but ourselves, too, for our enlightened notions of gender, when clearly Martin was as appreciated in 1908 as he would be today. On at least three occasions – when the Sonora is filled with rowdy drunks, when Carter dispatches him to Port Browning in a leaking boat, and when he finally quits the camp – Martin considers resorting to “the hard fist,” but instead eschews violence as a woman would. Then the Sonora sinks and he goes back to being cook and flunkey, to being “ma” himself. Stylistically, too, the book reflects the modest, unobtrusive Martin. Again and again he steps aside to allow another character his story, to let the men speak first. He gives even his own antagonist a full, uninterrupted fifty pages.

  Of course, in a first-person narrative we see the story as it is perceived by the protagonist, and Martin clearly suffers from, as Grainger himself evidently did, a ridiculously low opinion of himself. At the Hanson Island Hotel he chops “an amazing big pile of wood” continuously for three and a half days. “I began to get known,” he says. He has earned the esteem of the men he so admires, but has “no proper Western confidence,” he writes, “to make me oblivious of my lack of skill,” though more properly it should read: to make me conscious of my skill. He is “very much affected by other people’s judgement,” and continually imagines himself laughed at, even for the astonishing feat of nearly matching in a day-long race down an inlet two men who spell each other off in a lighter boat while Martin’s own is leaking! In the end he cannot endure the woodsman’s life, though not from any physical inadequacy. His temperament is too delicate. He is more suited to, and prefers, scrubbing his new wife’s kitchen floor. For there was a female presence in the forest all along, but we do not know it till the end – the recipient of his “sentimental letters.”

  Grainger himself never really left the woods, though for the next many years the forest was on paper. From hapless woodsman cum novelist, he became secretary of the Royal Commission on Provincial Forest Policy, then chief forester for the province, then manager of several forest-product and forest-investment companies. But he was never again a novelist and only really resumed writing when he retired and was back for his own pleasure in the woods.

  BY M. ALLERDALE GRAINGER

  FICTION

  Woodsmen of the West (1908)

  Copyright © 1996 by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Afterword copyright © 1996 by Caroline Adderson

  First published in 1908 by Edward Arnold, London

  First New Canadian Library edition 1996.

  This New Canadian Library edition 2010.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Grainger, Martin Allerdale, 1874–1941

  Woodsmen of the west / M. Allerdale Grainger; with an afterword

  by Caroline Adderson.

  (New Canadian library)

  eISBN: 978-0-7710
-3584-5

  1. Lumbering – British Columbia – Fiction. 2. Logging – British

  Columbia – Fiction. 3. Lumber camps – British Columbia – Fiction.

  I. Title. II. Series: New Canadian library

  PS8463.R345W66 2010 C813′.52 C2009-905029-3

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/NCL

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