The language of labour in the woods

Yer man posing beside a fully assembled steam donkey including mounted on a sled.

We’re on our annual retreat in Powell River, a place we have come to for the last five years to rest and reflect on the year that has been and think, ever so gently, about the year to come. Every year when we visit here we do many of the same things – walk the same trails, buy food from the same farmers, paddle or swim or visit the same places. And then we always do something a little different too, even small things.

Today was one of those things. We went for a walk to Willingdon Beach which is a pretty special site right downtown. It consists of a park and a beach and a campground with a trail that extends down the shoreline through the forest and is littered with old logging equipment. The gear has been left there along with interpretive signs as the outdoor part of the collection of the Powell River Forest Heritage Museum. We’ve often strolled by the steam donkey and the beached sidewinder and the steam shovel, but until today we’ve haven’t set foot inside the museum, which houses the collection in a couple of rooms.

It’s worth dropping in, if only for the language. The language of labour in the woods and the mines and the sea is old, technical and almost constitutes a dialect of its own. My friends Rika Ruebsaat and Jon Bartlett spent a substantial part of their lives capturing songs written in these languages. Reading the interpretive plaques in the museum gives life to the equipment and artifacts they have dating back 150 years.

Sometimes Geist Magazine publishes lists of words and terms and perhaps I’ll submit this list to them. I won’t even define what these terms mean, just let them clatter around in your ears and mind. In context most of them are really descriptive and self-explanatory. But out of context it seems like a mysterious technical language.

• High rigger 
• Drag saw 
• Butterfly
• gunning
• Falling, bucking and yarding
• Steam donkey
• Caulked boots
• Horse hames
• Yoke
• Gilchrist jack
• Sky hook
• Guy line shackle
• Roles on the steam donkey: Hook tender, chokerman, rigging slinger, whistle punk, fireman, chaser, woodcutter. 
• Shinglebolt
• Flume
• Froe and mallet. 
• Spike puller 
• Double butted axe
• Spring board
• Butt swell
• Notches 
• Back cut
• Jointer and raker
• Boomboat 
• Sidewinder

What a poem.