Kevin Collins, Part 1

Taken with permission from Continued From the Woods: True Tales of Timberworkers

How I came to purchase the Kenworth was I was living up on highway 20 and Buzz came up and said, “I want to sell you a truck.” I said that I really didn’t want to buy it and he said, “I will make you an offer you can’t refuse.” I was always a saver. I had some money in his safe because back in the old days you could coin some jack. I think I got the truck for $12,000 or $12,500, that was the truck and the trailer. I had to give him $3,800 cash to make it work out. I bought the truck in 1981 and the lumber market was really bad in 1981 and 1983. I just parked that truck and worked for Joe Jordan for those two years.

I was fighting fires when I was 21. CDF was completely different back then. They did a lot of their own work as far as building stations. The work weren’t contracted out to some general engineering contractor that was getting paid three times the money of our prevailing wage operation, the CDF did everything. All of those foremen in that place were very talented.

Our assistant camp director was a guy named Bob Yohr, who walked funny, he walked like a complete “spaz,” but that man could throw horseshoes like you would not believe! Years later, when my dad’s last wife, Dorothy, passed away, they had a memorial service for her at the Sonora mobile home park where she had lived. I drove down and after the service I am headed back out to the highway and I happen to look over at this one house. It has a shingle hanging on the porch that says YOHR and I thought, could that possibly be the same person, the director of the camp?

So I stop and knock on the door and this man walks up to the front door and I look inside and here is his wife and they have another couple and they are eating dinner. I told him that I was sorry and don’t mean to be interrupting anything, but I just had a quick question for him. He said what is that? I said, “Is your name Bob Yohr?” He said “Yes,” and then he recognized me. He asked me what I was doing and I told him I had a logging truck and worked in the woods. He asked me whereabouts, and I told him up out of Nevada City—and he kind of lit up. He asked me if I knew the North Columbia station.

Well, of course I did—it is up past Mother Truckers on Tyler Foote Road and it is the prettiest CDF station I have ever seen, all log cabin and the barracks and the garage, it is all gorgeous, especially in that setting. I told him how beautiful it was, and he just lit up and said, “I built that.” It was just complete coincidence that I ran into him in Sonora.

Let me tell you about one fire that I fought. Everything that is happening in the woods right now, I have a completely different perspective on it because I knew how things worked 40 or 50 years ago. The biggest fire I was on in two years with CDF was 17,000 acres. We were the first hand crew there, because our hand crew was stationed at Angels Camp and I was on crew one because I worked in the shop. The fire was on old Pickering Lumber Company ground, and they determined later that it had been started by a piece of brake shoe that had fallen off of a logging truck and rolled into the grass. The fire got put out in relatively short order and one of my fondest memories that I will EVER have my whole life is that we started off on a paved road and cut line up a hill to the top of a ridge.

We got there about five or six in the evening and worked 37 hours straight on two quarts of water, that was all we had. No Nomex, just khaki shirt, blue jeans and a pair of boots and that was it. One old military surplus belt, the webbed belt with a bunch of holes and a one quart canteen on each side and that is all we had for 37 hours in the heat fighting fire. In the middle of the night, after six or seven hours of cutting line we are half way up this ridge and the foreman—J R Taylor, an old Arkie—said “Okay, you guys, take a blow.”

We all just stopped and just about that time an inmate crew arrived. We were instructed to not make contact with these guys, don’t say a word to them, don’t get close to them, just pretend they don’t exist. These guys the foreman all worked with before we came along and he said that they will F* you before you know it. They were game players, so we were instructed not to talk to them. We are all taking a blow and here comes this crew up behind us and they motored right on past us, and as they went by, one of the lead guys made some kind of a snarky comment about a bunch of lazy asses because we were finally getting a blow. One of the guys on the crew and I don’t know who it was, maybe Jeff Johansson, blew right back and said, “Hey M…er F…er!” and that guy just shut his mouth and they just went right on up.

So we get up to the top and by the time we are up on the top of the hill it is daylight and they are starting to make air drops on the ridge below us. One of the things that was flying directly eye level and maybe 400 to 500 yards out from where we are at the ridge is a B17. They didn’t fly much lower than that. I can still hear the reverberation of those engines, in a B17 making drops.

I was the crew leader and Sam was the assistant crew leader because I had been there a year and a half, and Sam was a really neat redheaded good guy and never swore. Very handsome fella’ and he ended up getting dehydrated and they had to pack him out in an ambulance. He said that was the most miserable trip.