I left the Bute Inlet camp in early November after my dad passed. I had a problem with the timekeeper. It was over something stupid, and I threw away a good job over it. My cousin Larry and I were running a chokerman school using a mini tower. They were hiring so many green guys that we needed to teach them the basics of logging before sending them out. It was a good job.
A couple of brothers I knew offered me a job on the rigging up on Gilford Island. They were good guys to work for. It was a small operation and a decent camp. I was a rigging handyman.
The crew was always joking around. We all got along well. One day, I was working as the landing man; it was a wet and windy day, and I was soaked. I was tight up against the yarder that one of the brothers was running, trying to stay out of the driving rain. As I was huddling there, I saw that there was a golden fluid hitting my hard hat. All I could think of as I leaped away was how he would come out and take a piss just about where I had been pressed up against the machine. I looked up in horror only to see him holding a half-full cup of tea that he had just been slowly pouring over my hard hat, grinning a big grin.
Earlier that day, I had to trim the ends off some 7/8s wire that had been cut with a torch, and I needed to get him back. So I started fooling around with one strand about 4 inches long. I spread the strands out, and it started to look like a spider. He hated spiders. So I took some thread off my coat and tied some roughed cedar bark on as a body, and damn if it didn’t look like a big scary brown 7-inch spider. The lunch kits were in the crummy, so I took his lunch box and put this spider in it and closed it up again. Come lunchtime when we were all in the crummy staying out of the wind and rain, I watched him out of the corner of my eye, he lifted the top off his box and for about 10 seconds sat there just looking at his lunch box before, all of a sudden, he throws the lunch kit up and jumps back before realizing it was not real. Payback is a bitch.
Partway through a shift, one of the guys had to go to town, so I was put pulling rigging on the sidehill. It was early morning. I was standing on a small rock outcrop, fighting a big cedar hangup. As I turned to say something to my chokerman, I slipped and went sliding down, catching a rock outcropping with my left knee. The pain was so intense that I was feeling dizzy and felt like throwing up.
My chokerman ran down to see how badly I was hurt. I told him that I banged my knee and would need to take a rest for a few minutes. I asked him to help me up the bluff, as I put my arm around his neck and went to take a step with my left leg, the pain was excruciating. That’s when I blacked out.
There was a faller in camp who was a big faller. He was twice as broad as I at the shoulders. When I came to him, he was packing me in his arms up to the road, he was saying, “Hang in there, little buddy”. He was packing me like a child. When he got me to the road, they put me on a stretcher, loaded me in the ambulance and raced me down to camp.
Once in camp, they took me from the ambulance and tried to get me into the first aid shack. There was a door with a porch going into the shack, but it was a 90-degree entrance, and they almost dumped me trying to get the stretcher around the corner. The stretcher could not make the turn. So they took me into the cook shack and laid me out on a table. A plane was called, and a stay in the hospital ensued, and a knee operation would be required. They booked me with the bone doctor. Dr. Leet said it was going to be the spring before he could make it happen.