06/21/26

Railway is slow as hell this year.

I started working for a young kid up here. My first time working from home like this in 10 years.

He’s got a skid steer and a lil 5 ton excavator. He’s got no logo or fuck all, no company name. He’s busy as hell, all word of mouth. He’s paying me cash, the rate is good.

He’s only 30 years old, has two kids and a third on the way. Has lots of guns, hates the government.

The first job I was on, we were just clearing land for some old woman who’s got a few properties up here. She treats him good, He doesn’t overcharge her. He’s been doing jobs for her for a few years.

He schooled me when I was taking down a tree the first day. My first time taking a tree down that big, it was maybe 70 feet tall or something.

I thought I was alright with a chainsaw. Me and a crew of guys cut down 35 miles of old power pole line in northern Ontario a couple years ago, but the poles are only like 40 feet at the tallest, and all the trees over there are small.

So I notched the front of the tree in line with where I wanted it to fall and then I started doing my back cut on an angle which is a big fucking no-no I guess. For some reason, I thought doing the back cut on a downward angle made sense. The trees leaning that way anyway and it’s notched in the front, surely it just separates, but I guess it’s actually more likely to come back and pinch your bar. You wanna do your back cut flat.

So anyway I’m doing my dumbass angled back cut and the tree isn’t falling. He sees me and starts yelling, saying how fucked I am. I start to panic but manage to push the tree over and get outta the way.

Meanwhile He’s running around cutting down 100 footers waist-deep in deadfall and Salal with fucking boardshorts on.

We put all the small trees into firewood piles. We keep all the bigger ones that are millable—oh yeah, He’s got a mill too.

We stack them in great big piles on dunnage with the skiddy. Start high in the back and work your way forward. It’s fun flinging the logs up onto the piles with the skiddy. You load ‘em on the forks and lift them up real high, tilt the forks down and when the log rolls to the end you fling your forks up like a pinball flipper. Real satisfying when you fling a 40 foot log and it lands right where you want it to.

We got another great big job on a property just a couple minutes up the road from my house. Putting in a pond and big greenhouse and a utility shed. Probably be there all summer.

I stripped all the sod with the skiddy, you get the bucket under it and start driving forward and peel it up like a rug. I made a pile of it the size of a school bus back in the trees on the edge of the property.

Yesterday we were waiting for surveyors to come and mark out the property so we knew where we could put our foundation for the greenhouse. They were taking their sweet-ass time so we went and did another job building some stairs at a house on Hicks road. Real nice stairs, made out of milled cedar.

At lunch I went to the new fancy coffee shop up the road. Got a seventeen dollars sandwich, a coffee and some artisanal soda water that probably cost five bucks, must have, the whole thing came out to damn near thirty dollars. I came back to site and He asked me how it was. I told him there were all sorts of hipsters in there that I’d never seen before, felt like the city. He said, can you believe we have to feed those people? Waste of fucking resources.

I haven’t been going up to the ranch much since I started the new job. But Andy’s still been calling me.

He called me yesterday, it was Saturday morning and beautiful. He talked about how good it felt to wake up on a Saturday without a hangover with it being all beautiful like it was.

He talked about how much pain he used to wake up in ‘cause he used to love to smash his head into telephone poles.

After we talked on the phone I decided to drive the hour up there and visit him.

My day off and the first thing I’m doing is laying out some dusty ass blankets so I can get under the big crane truck and grease the whole damn thing.

After that he wanted to drive up the highway a little ways to check out a job he wanted to do. A cleanup job he’s gonna do for free as his payback to the community.

So we drive up the highway to this forest service road and there was shit all over the place. A flipped over truck in the ditch, garbage everywhere and two charred trailer frames. The road had a big burn patch in the middle of it and all the trees along the road had black marks up their sides from where they had been licked by flames.

When I asked Andy what the mess was all from, he told me that a known pedophile had been released from prison and decided to set up camp in the woods there.

Some of the boys in town decided to drag all his shit out of the bush and set fire to it in the middle of the road.

We headed back to the ranch after and Andy sent me home with a pound of ground beef.