Taken with permission from Continued From the Woods: True Tales of Timberworkers It took an hour and a half to get to the hospital from where we were and he said he was delirious and the guy in the ambulance was physically holding him down. He recovered alright, but not good. Finally JR got on the radio and told them that we needed to get relief up here because these guys are dying up here! It was quite an experience. That was 17,000 acres and that was up by Cherry Lake and the park borderline goes right through the lake. When I was logging, all they ever worked as a timber faller was seven hours. Those guys liked those hours because they would have to go back to camp and work on their saws for three hours. Dennis Harvey had quite a collection of saws. His whole garage is like a museum. You can’t park anything in it because he has axes, saws and you think you have seen everything and then I looked up in the rafters and I started laughing. He asked me what I was laughing about and I said, “You are unreal!” When I was driving truck there was one job that Jay Wilcox had when I lived in Camptonville. This job was off of Highway 50 up on the Ice House Road, and I would have to wake up in the middle of Johnny Carson monologue, and if you remember he started right after the 11 o’clock news at 11:30 and I was waking up at a quarter to midnight to go to work. Jay would start loading at three. Jay was always a great logger, but he wouldn’t give anybody a time to load, he had 13 trucks and he would tell you what time he started loading and you would get there at three o’clock and there would be six trucks waiting in there to get loaded. Then if you showed up at three twenty nobody was there. He would say, “Where the hell have you been?” so finally I got tired of waking up at a quarter to midnight driving three hours to the job to discover that I was going to have to wait an hour and a half to get loaded, so finally I just said screw it. Fortunately, I was far enough in my career that the truck was paid for, it was in good shape, I just flat didn’t care. So I show up at eight thirty and I pull into the landing and here is Danny and Jay outside the loader talking. They look at me and I look out the window at them and they look at their watch and look at me. I get out of the truck and I go walking up to them and they say, “Good morning” and I said, “How are you doing?” They say, “Where have you been?” and I say, “Well, I decided that if you are not going to give me a time to get here and get loaded, I am going to show up at eight thirty and pull one load. If you want to give me a time to get here and get loaded, I will be here early, but I am not going to wake up before midnight and get down here and wait an hour and a half to get loaded.” Jay didn’t own any trucks. They were all gyppos and so it was no skin off of his nose. I didn’t say anymore except to tell them that if they want to give me a time I will be here. Next morning they gave us times to load, which lasted for about a month. Ha! That particular haul you would very seldom get home before seven o’clock. You would get home at seven, eat dinner, shower and get ready to go in the morning, go to bed at nine o’clock and wake up three hours later to go to work again. That is something you could never do today. The last year I drove it was earlier in the year and going that same way there is a road down by Placerville called Cold Springs Road and it is a shortcut from Highway 49 to Highway 50 and I am trucking along empty, probably around three or three thirty in the morning. I am coming around a turn and there is a big cutbank on the right as I am going around this turn and I see this set of headlights and I could have sworn that they were on my side. Well, by the time I got into the corner, he had gotten back over on his side of the road and he went around me. I had the same thing happen when I lived up on highway 20 just before you get to Harmony Ridge, that last tight turn a couple of guys come whistling down the hill and they were on my side of the road and they could see me coming because that was during the daylight. My worst experience was in the middle of the summer and they had just finished the bypass on Highway 20 and at the long straight stretch up on top of the hill, I am going back up empty. You know how the road is it is two lane with a very wide shoulder on both sides and there was three cars coming at me. There was a van that was either first or second, there was a car behind the first two. As I am driving down the road this van starts coming into my lane, a white Ford van, and at first you are just so shocked you don’t want to lock them up because you don’t know if it’s somebody screwing with you or you don’t know what is going on. So I hit the brakes but I didn’t lock them up. This guy proceeded to come right across my lane pass me over on the shoulder, went around behind me and got right back in where he was with the two other cars! Later that afternoon there was a wreck down by Sycamore Ranch on Highway 20 on the way to Marysville, and a white Ford van crashed in the wet area by that bridge. It had something to do with drugs, I don’t know if it was prescription or otherwise. I kind of put it together that that was the same guy that I met and he was just tweaking or something. That is when I started thinking about quitting, I was just starting to get nervous and I had never even had any kind of an accident, unlike Doug Lawson.