Hell And High Water (February 1967 | Volume: 18, Issue: 2)

Hell And High Water

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Authors: Robert E. Pike

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February 1967 | Volume 18, Issue 2

The lumberjack was a special breed of a man, but the riverman was very special. Like the cowboy, he was a product of his environment, and now that the environment has passed, he no longer exists. He started in the Northeast, where countless streams and rivers come tumbling down from remote and tangled mountains. The lumber was there, but there were no roads, and the only way to get it out was by water. The streams were not suitable for rafting and were not navigable by lumber schooners, so the logs came down loose; and they had to come in the spring, when the melting snows swelled the rivers. Two phrases coined in river-driving days remain in popular usage: “come hell or high water” and “as easy as falling off a log.”

It is very easy to fall off a log, even a large one, as you can prove to yourself by trying not to. The rivermen not only rode logs through rapids, treading them with squirrel-like agility; they also used the slippery, unstable timbers to stand on while they worked.

As they pushed and heaved stranded logs, they seemed to balance themselves automatically. They treaded now one way, now another as the log rolled, instinctively adjusting to the buoyancy of the wood. Townspeople would watch them for hours, fascinated.

It was said that good rivermen were born, not made; at least they had to start early. When they were small boys of eight, they began practicing and were fished out of the river a hundred times. At an early age they took naturally to the pike pole and the peavey, working first in the still waters of the mill ponds and later on in the drive. These men developed an inarticulate love for the river. The work was hard and dangerous, the food was not of the best, there were no women, wages were low—and yet the call of the river drew them, just as the call of the sea draws the sailor. “I want to go back to my little river,” Dan Bosse, the great log-driver of the Androscoggin, lamented to me in his old age.

When the logs had been rolled into the stream and the drive had reached swift water, then the special skills of the “river hogs” came into action. They would work and heave and pry on a tall jam for hours trying to edge the logs out into the current. All at once the apparently solid surface began to creak and settle. The men zigzagged rapidly to shore. A crash and a spout of water marked where the first tier had broken free. The front melted like sugar. A vast, formidable movement agitated the brown tangles as far as one could see. And then, with another sudden and mighty crash that could be heard for miles, the whole river burst into a torrent of motion.

If everything had gone well, the men