Tom Sawyer

I decided to find work and earn a little money until the snow melted on the higher slopes of Mount Lassen so I could start my pebbly ley line,.

I heard a man named Harry had a firewood cutting contract with the Forest Service in nearby Child’s Meadows—just off Highway 36 a few miles east from Mill Creek village. I found him at his camp in the woods and he offered me a job—loading firewood piece by piece onto his beat-up old two-and-a-half-ton truck. The pay was not much—when I got any money at all since sometimes Harry paid me in firewood which I could sell or trade for things I needed— but the work was fun and very educational and, like I said, my gypsy life-style didn’t take much cash.

I love working outdoors and the men and the women who follow the firewood trade are curiosities to say the least.

For example, one of Harry’s sawyers had cut a window-sized hole in one of the tree trunks near Harry’s camp and he delighted to open his “window” to peer at us from behind the tree. The same guy loved to toss his empty beer cans around where we were working in the deep forest. I scolded him once about littering and he told me “I want people to know I’ve been working out here—that’s why I leave the cans!” To show there were no hard feelings he let me use his chain saw a bit so he could call me “Tom Sawyer”.

We were all dirt poor—living on white bread and peanut butter. One day the grandson of one of the old-time sawyers showed up with his new teenage bride to work with us since he could find no job down in the valley. (Sacramento, Chico, Red Bluff, etc.)

When I came out of the woods later that day, I found that the new man had accidentally swung his hand too close to a running chain saw and cut off the ends of a couple of his fingers––and this was before he had even picked up a single piece of firewood!

None of the other workers in the camp had enough gas in their vehicles to drive him to the doctor in Chester twenty miles away, so he wrapped his hand in a handkerchief and with his bride, hitch-hiked away for help. The Chester doc sewed him up and he spent the rest of the summer working with us.

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