Why Your Business Is Still a Draft

SP Subash

The Halverson boom sat at the tidal junction two miles upriver from the salt water, where the current from the interior logging camps met the first push of the ocean and the logs came off the river in loose, uneven masses that spread across the channel and had to be read before they could be sorted. The sorting channel was bounded on both sides by long boom sticks, old-growth cedar logs chained end to end at the waterline, their bark black and slick with river water and their surfaces worn smooth by years of boot traffic. The water between them was the color of strong tea from the tannins leaching out of the timber, and the logs moved through it with a low grinding sound, bark against bark, the mass of them pressing forward with the weight of the current behind them.

Arno ran the sidewinder from the upstream end. The boat was steel-hulled and flat-bottomed, its fenders scarred from years of working alongside moving timber, and he drove it with one hand on the tiller and one eye on the anchor chains that held the sorting channel’s mouth open against the incoming raft. The chains ran from the boom sticks to iron pins driven into the riverbed and the tension in them told him the feed rate. When they went slack the raft was pushing too fast and he nudged the bow of the sidewinder into the mass to slow it, and when they went bar-taut he backed off and let the logs come.

Maeve worked the junction from the main walkway, a platform of planking laid across three boom sticks lashed together that flexed underfoot with the movement of the water beneath it and threw a fine cold spray up through the gaps with each log that passed underneath. She carried a fourteen-foot aluminium pike pole, its hook worn to a bright silver curve from use, and she worked it with both hands, driving the point into the bark of each incoming log, reading the grain and the colour and the weight of the response in her palms, and shunting left for cedar or right for fir. Douglas fir went dark at the end grain when it was wet and the bark came away in flat plates. Cedar was lighter and smelled of pencils and the grain was tight and even and the pole met it differently, a shorter stop, less give.

Cal worked the downstream pockets, moving along the outer boom stick with the chain dogs hanging from his belt and the pockets filling on either side of him. The dogs were cast iron with a threaded shank and a hinged jaw that bit into the log when driven in and held under pressure, and he set them by feel, two logs apart, the chain running between them across the face of the pocket. He judged the pocket full by how low the outer boom stick was riding.

A fully loaded pocket sat the outer log three inches above the waterline on a calm stretch, two inches in chop, and when it was full he sealed it with a second chain and moved on.

The tide turned twice a day. For twenty minutes at slack water the river current stopped and the ocean pushed back and the logs in the sorting channel lost their forward momentum and began to rotate slowly, their ends swinging out against the boom sticks and pressing the sticks outward against the chains. All of it was adjustable. The sorting angle changed with the reversed current. The feed rate dropped and the pocket weights had to be read against the new pressure on the outer boom sticks. Dag made these calls on every tide turn.

Founding is the point at which an enterprise ceases to be a draft and begins to have a history.

On the third morning of the spring run Dag drove upriver to the logging camp to settle a dispute over the grade of an incoming raft. He was gone before slack water. Arno held the sidewinder off the main raft and watched the anchor chains go loose as the current stopped. Maeve planted her pike pole and felt the log beneath her rotate and did not shunt it because the angle was wrong for the reversed current. Cal stood on the outer boom stick with a dog in his hand and did not seal the pocket because the boom stick was riding differently under the reversed pressure. The morning sort sat in the channel for two hours while the tide ran back out and the current reasserted itself and the logs straightened and resumed their forward movement.

Dag returned at midday. The channel had cleared itself. The afternoon run made up most of the morning’s loss. The tow went out on schedule. The mill received its delivery.