sedro woolley logging rodeo

Add comment July 3rd, 2009

misery whippins

Add comment July 3rd, 2009

You younguns out there who grew up with  about 3 Homelites and 2 Husquevarnas in the shed might never have experienced the joy of a crosscut saw in your modern day lives.  You put a partner on one end and each of you take turns pulling.  About two minutes into it, you’re muttering and cussing, you’re thinking the other guy is a moron who can’t figure out the simple physics of keeping the saw on a straight and true trajectory.  No,  he’s binding it in the cut.  He’s making you work twice as hard as you need to.   What he needs is a talking to …. Or an ax handle across the forehead.  Maybe both !!
 

    Mostly what you learned is that you don’t want to get on the wrong end of one of those crosscut saws, which we called misery whips for a good reason.  Which one’s the wrong end, you ask?  Both of em.  Many a friendship ended using those misery whips.

logger family

Add comment July 3rd, 2009

     My old man was a logger.  His old man was a logger too.  Both of em worked together in the woods of Northern Maine.  So cold, he said, the saw would freeze in the cut.  Snow so deep, he said, the springboard notch was half way up the tree.  Temperatures so low they had to fight off the polar bears migrating south with the muskoxen. 
 

    My old man was so tall with his tales, I’m surprised he didn’t mention his Blue Ox Babe.  We’re gonna sing you a tune from a time before logging was a conspiracy to kill spotted owls and we turned Paul Bunyan and Smokey the Bear into corporate thugs…..

sedro woolley logging rodeo concert

Add comment July 3rd, 2009

We all live now in an age that likes to look back in time. Nostalgia’s kinda become a religion. Old is good. New is cheap junk made in China. Old is tried and true. New is digital and scary.

I spoze someday they’ll have a Sedro-Woolley Computer Rodeo instead of a logging rodeo. Google search races. MP3 Download Competitions. You Tube Beauty Contests.

The next generation of kids are gonna look back at logging the way we looked back at outhouses — just a little primitive. Course, we’ll ask em, same as my old man asks us boyz, you gonna make plastic toilet paper??

We’re gonna do this next song the old fashioned way —- with instruments made from wood, aged long enuff the slow way and whittled with hand tools into shape. Just like us!