My grandma had just retired, she met Ken in Sandspit, a small community on Haida Gwaii, off the coast of B.C. Ken ran a small sawmill on the outskirts of town, cutting mainly cedar and spruce trees. My grandma, then in her late fifties, hard working and adventurous, became Ken’s partner in the sawmill.
The next summer, 1996, we had a family reunion at my grandma’s place in Sandspit. She had a large property (large by coastal standards, so maybe an acre) directly across the street from the beach. The family came from all over.
During the reunion, grandma offered me a job at Ken Foote Contracting. This came in the form of a hire letter she had typed up as a sort of joke memento of the occasion. I was offered a starting wage of $4.50 an hour and promised that if the fishing was good we’d take a break from work.
When the reunion ended everyone took the ferry back to the mainland. I stayed behind, sweeping sawdust off the mill floor and putting scraps of wood into the waste pile. I was staying in the spare room in my grandma’s duplex, it was tiny and full of boxes.
In the morning Ken would be up early brewing coffee and making business calls with a voice that sent ripples out into the bay. His vocal chords had been charred from a lifetime of smoking, but also soothed by a lifetime of coastal humidity. His phone calls often started with, “It’s Ken! (pause) Ken Foote!” but I heard them as “It’s ten! (pause) ten foot!”
Back then I didn’t know how deaf Ken was, nor did I know that he had been a faller for most of his life. He had worked through the heart of the boom years of logging in B.C. and spent many years on southern Haida Gwaii in Moresby camp where he lived with his family in the married quarters.
When I was 13, Ken moved the sawmill to a logging camp on the north end of the islands. As a salvage logger, Ken took leftover wood from bigger logging operations — shorter logs, or wood once used for bridges.
I remember cruising for logs one day when he scuffed his boot along what looked like a rotten log half buried in the dirt. But with his boots, Ken bit into the solid, red flesh of a red cedar log. “You see that Aaron,” he said to me, “That’s a $50 bill lying in the bush.” Moving his sawmill to a new area meant a chance to find a lot more of those $50 bills.
I joined him and grandma in logging camp the next summer. The camp was about 100 kilometres north of Sandspit. It sat next to a lake at the base of a low mountain whose whole southern face had been sheared to the skin by a massive clear cut. The offices, kitchen, saw shop and living space for Ken Foote Contracting was set up a short walk from the main camp. It was known as the “Shaker Shack.” It consisted of two old trailers facing each other with a damp wooden gangway running between them and a tin roof over the gap in the trailers. For the first couple years it wouldn’t have looked out of place at a landfill, but eventually it got fixed up.
For the next five years I spent a few weeks in camp every summer. In this time Ken became something of a grandfather to me. We fished, we played cards, he told stories.
“Outdoorsman” doesn’t properly describe Ken. An outdoorsman implies a return to comfort when your time outdoors is over. Ken Foote was of the bush. He exerted a control over his body and an awareness of his surroundings that was near omniscient. In all the years and all the outings I had with Ken — walking slippery rocks at low tide or struggling to get fallen logs out of the bush — I don’t know if he once lost his footing. He moved through hostile environments as if he were making coffee in his kitchen. Ken radiated strength, a shapeless strength. He wasn’t angular like a muscle car, he was practical like a train engine. When he drove the work truck, he was like a lead ball behind the wheel. When we saw a bear he would sometimes stop the truck and roll down his window. “You wanna fight?” he’d say to the bear. Then he’d look over at me and laugh.
After finishing high school I started working longer shifts with Ken. He and my grandma had separated by this point and the dynamic between him and I changed. It was a good change though, we could both shed some of the familial courtesies and relate to each other as adults.
He told me more about his life before the mill. Ken started logging in the 1950s just as chainsaws were coming into use. He told me one of his first jobs was operating a massive two man chainsaw at a log sort on Vancouver Island. Later, he started falling trees for a living. Technology was still crude, there were no shock absorbers in the chainsaws, they were also much louder and heavier than they are today. His wrists and hands were thick from years of slinging heavy saws. His ears were burnt right out. He’d tell stories when we drove to work and if I had a question he would, without fail, lean closer to me and yell, “HUH?”
Ken talked about falling big trees, so big he would sometimes spend nearly half a day working on one tree. Once he was falling a tree with an oddly hollow bottom, underneath the stump he found a human skeleton. The tree growing on top was nearly 1000 years old. He knew other secrets too, where the biggest trees on the islands were, where steam locomotives from early logging days were rotting in the bush, where the best, most remote mushroom picking spots were.
Ken wasn’t the smoothest business man. He often forgot equipment we’d need for the day, and the equipment we did have would’ve never looked out of place at a landfill. But Ken’s business strength was offset by other strengths, the day to day doing, his literal strength. This was on fine display when we were out getting logs to bring back to the sawmill.
The year I spent the most time in camp happened to be the year Ken had access to the best timber he’d ever had. Some of the spruce and cedar logs we salvaged that year were so big that we could only put three of them at a time on a standard highway sized logging truck. Once at the sawmill, we used a chainsaw with a seven foot bar to cut the trees into quarters so we could fit them onto the mill.
We were getting these logs from patches of “blowdown,” — trees that have blown over in the wind. Blowdown accumulates at the edges of cut blocks where root systems have been damaged and there is high exposure to wind. The trees tip over but remain attached to their roots.
To get the blowdown out of the bush it first had to be cut off at the root wad. Ken did the saw work, he told me cutting blowdown could actually be more dangerous than falling trees. From its horizontal position It’s liable to twist and move in unpredictable ways.
Knowing these dangers, I watched Ken with intense interest as he cut. He ran the saw and navigated the blowdown with a seamless ease. He changed his cutting position well ahead of danger, starting on one side of the log, then slithering to the other before it broke free and smacked with deadly force into his previous spot. He did all this in the near dark of the early morning. And he did it all despite not having run a saw like this for a number of years and not having fallen trees for over a decade. Steam rose from his ratty work fleece and the headlights of his tired logging equipment occasionally glinted across the silver of his caulk boots while he knelt over top of the enormous trees.
Ken and I would follow the logging truck back to the sawmill in his old blue pickup. The truck had a bench seat which was always covered in coffee cups and chains and day planners. He would climb into the truck and fill it with the stench of cedar and saw gas and body odour.
Sometimes on those drives, especially if we’d been in camp for a while, one of us would snooze while the other drove. It was rare rest in that environment, we worked long hours, then cooked for ourselves in the evening. After a couple weeks in camp you were pretty much always tired.
Once, after a particularly long, hard day I remember pulling up to the Shaker Shack after dark. We were deep into our shift and Ken and a couple others were the only human faces I’d seen for weeks. I was exhausted and oblivious to the fact that right after we parked, Ken had hustled inside ahead of me and closed the door. I walked up the back steps to the dry room and just before
I put my hand on the door it burst open. On the other side was Ken with a big smile and a look of mock surprise “Oh, company! Come on in Aaron!” he said.
I laughed and stepped inside.