Taken with permission from Continued From the Woods: True Tales of Timberworkers
Charlie Hants is related to the Church family and the Church place was just North of our ranch. They used to have property right next to the ranch. I have a good story of Charlie Hants. He had a pretty slick truck because he could switch over between short logs and long logs and he was hauling long logs for Ted Wentworth, and if there was ever a hammer head, it was Ted Wentworth. A good operator, a good logger, but just don’t fuck with him. Charlie was down there getting loaded and Charlie was a perfectionist, like I can relate to, and he was getting loaded with Bohemia logs, the bigger diameter logs. He was just about loaded and Ted Wentworth put a pretty good size log on him that was 1500 over, so Ted took that off. Charlie wanted to get that thing loaded to the nuts and so he told Ted that if he was going to nit pick about 1500 pounds it is hard to pick logs when they are big ones.
Ted didn’t say another word—he just started yanking all the big logs off and went over to the small log sort and loaded Charlie’s truck with small logs and never said a word. Charlie drove off knowing that he did something wrong. Charlie was a good guy though.
I never wanted anything to happen to my truck. My whole life was in that truck. There was a lot of work in getting that truck nice and I couldn’t imagine starting all over again. I had that truck from the time I bought it in 1981 until it burned up in the Trauner Fire in 1994. I wasn’t home when that fire started. I was up above Georgetown working on my machine on a Sunday afternoon. The fire happened at 3:30 pm and Gaylene was at the house alone, it was the old school in Rough and Ready then and my shop was built and old Blue was in the shop along with all the other beautiful things that we had acquired and I had a little Wilderness travel trailer just like my camp trailer.
Gaylene was recovering from knee surgery and she was in the Wilderness travel trailer and she had a machine that she would use for her knee. She was relaxing because it was a hot day 94 degrees, 15% humidity and the wind was blowing at 25 mph. Anyway, she was in that trailer and she got a whiff of a puff of smoke. All she had time to do, was load the two dogs up and herself and get out (she had her Toyota pickup then). She looked back as she was driving down the driveway and the school house was already in flames.
The wind was blowing so hard, it caught all that brush on fire down at the creek which is just as bad or worse now in 2018. That is why I was sweating during that Lobo fire. Gaylene woke me up at 4:30 in the morning and said, “Get up, get up, there is a fire somewhere and the power is out.” She was asleep in the bedroom and I was asleep with the old dog on the couch. I walked out on the front porch and looked out and the ridge across the road all you could see was the smoke blowing sideways from East to West at about 35 or 40 mph and the glow. All it would have taken was a shift in the wind. They had predicted that the wind was going to shift to a North wind. CDF did a hell of a job because what they did was basically painted a perimeter on that fire and brought the dozers in the next day. They had NO line, they just used what they call the very large air tankers and they used them to paint a line and steer the fire towards Lake Wildwood and away from us.
The next morning I wake up and I am watching everything that was going on. It was a mad house in Rough and Ready, there were engines everywhere and the Firehouse and the Post Office and everywhere else down there was inundated. The first two days it was at the Firehouse and Tuesday morning when I woke up , every time I would hear something I would go out and see what was going on and that morning I saw seven different dozers going up the hill to Bitney Springs Road. They were cutting line from the start of the fire.
I saw the 49er Fire get started. I was driving to work up at French Creek and it must have been a Sunday because I was driving to work and saw an idiot up there at the old school house that was burning toilet paper and throwing it up in the air. It had just started when I drove by and I came into town and I was working for Jay. I came into town and got what I needed and I remember when I got down to the bottom of the hill you could see it had just blown up.
In reference to that and the Lobo Fire: Where the Lobo Fire got started was right over the hill from Grass Valley Group. There is a road that kind of goes through the Group and over the hill. Gaylene and I were looking for George Douglass’s daughter Kimberly, because she lived out there and we were trying to find her. I never did find her, but that is where we ended up going and George was still alive, so it has been 20 years ago and that whole side of the hill, and now I am convinced because I have seen it from the air.
I would go visit George Douglass every other week and see what he was up to and it was just him and me in the shop, and he never liked to talk about himself. He was always real interested in what you were doing and what was new, but he never talked about himself.
But this one particular time, just about a couple of weeks before he died, he started talking.